Questions and Answers 

Q1 Can you give examples to show the important roles of guilds in the real world?

The members of the guild exploit the same resources for food and often compete for the same ecological niche. The mutualistic or symbiotic relations among the members of the guild ensure that they all stay protected and functional (Sutherland et al., 2013). The importance of guilds ecology can be explained with the help of example, as stated below:
The oak foliage gleaning guild consists of five different populations of birds like Vireo huttoni, Vireo gilvus, Vireo celata, Pareo inornata and Polioptila caerulea. The dietary habits of these bird species consists of insects (same class of resource) that resides on the leaves of the oak tree. Thus, this guild exploits the same natural resource for the same food item. However, the existence of the guild ensures that none of the bird species are competitively excluded from the ecology and all are able to survive successfully in the ecological niche.

Q2 Can you explain the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis in ecology?

Disturbances in ecology refer to the natural and the artificial phenomenon like forest fires or deforestation, which are capable of disrupting the normal species existing in the ecological systems. As per the IDH, the disturbances of moderate intensity, neither too frequent nor too rare, are capable of establishing maximum diversity in the ecological systems. Frequent disturbances hamper species succession while rare disturbances encourage competitive exclusion among species and thus, their elimination from the ecosystem.
The species in a particular ecosystem get established by the process of ecological succession. In the different phases of the succession process, the primary colonizers change or modify the existing conditions of the ecosystem concerned, and make it more favorable for the survival of the secondary colonizers, who then, inhabit the ecosystem. In this way, one or more species start coexisting in a particular ecosystem. On experiencing moderate disturbance, be it natural or artificial, ‘gaps’ are created in the ecosystem, which are capable of housing associated but different species of the colonizers that were already residing in the place. In this way, the species diversity of the concerned ecosystem flourishes, when an intermediate disturbance occurs. An example is the occurrence of hurricanes of medium intensity and the changes in the species inhabiting the coral reefs of the oceans.

Q3 Can you construct some graphs to illustrate this species – area relationship?

Fig: Graph for demonstrating the relation between the species richness and the habitat it abounds Source: (Sergio et al., 2014)