Ecological Fitting Quotes

“What all these stories show is that no law of nature forces native animals to prefer their natural foods, or even to recognize them. Some do (say koalas on gum leaves) but many don’t. A currawong guzzling grapes might not look quite natural to us, but the bird doesn’t see it that way. By nature it is an opportunist. For our native wildlife, the foreign plants and animals flourishing in Australia today afford untold opportunities too good to pass by.”
― Tim Low, Radio Volume 2

“A long-standing question in the assembly of communities, ecosystems and regional biotas concerns the relative contributions of abiotic environmental conditions (such as climate), species interactions (such as competition and predation), evolutionary and coevolutionary adjustments, and stochastic processes (such as population demography)
[32]. This question has increased importance in a world where species ranges are rapidly shifting in response to climate change and human transport [14,34]. In this context it is important to ask whether species assemblages with novel combinations of species (including both native and exotic species) function in the same way as native
assemblages, even when many of the constituent species do not have a shared evolutionary history. The answer to this question, although pressing, is still unclear [16,35–37]. What is becoming clear, however, is that assemblages composed largely of exotic species can and do occur (e.g. plant communities that dominate portions of many oceanic islands, such as Ascension Island [16,36]), and that assemblages
dominated by exotic species, such as Eucalyptus
globulus woodlands in California, can be as species-rich as those dominated by native species [38]. We believe that these findings support Janzen’s [39] conjecture, which was based largely on patterns observed with native species, that diverse assemblages of species with complex ecological
relationships can be formed by the ecological ‘fitting’
[40] and ‘sorting’ of species (sensu Ackerly [41]), that is, solely through ecological interactions among species, and that a long history of coevolution is not always necessary to explain the species composition of communities. Although species coexisting in such recently formed assemblages might not have a prolonged history of evolutionary coadaptation,
rapid evolutionary adjustments might still have occurred over timescales of decades to centuries.”
― Dov F. Sax