How Species Coexist

In this talk, ecologist Robert Pringle discusses how large herbivores can coexist by partitioning ecological niches by time, space, and diet.

There are over 30 species of herbivores in the African savanna, yet these species coexist in the same habitat without one species outcompeting all the others. Pringle describes a method called metabarcoding, which uses plant DNA recovered from animal dung to identify exactly which plant species each animal eats. This technique has allowed scientists to obtain a more accurate picture of how herbivores partition ecological niches by diet.

This talk is from a 2015 Holiday Lecture Series, Patterns and Processes in Ecology.