Competitive exclusion principle
Ecology proposition / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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"Gause's law" redirects here. Not to be confused with Gauss's law.
In ecology, the competitive exclusion principle,[1] sometimes referred to as Gause's law,[2] is a proposition that two species which compete for the same limited resource cannot coexist at constant population values. When one species has even the slightest advantage over another, the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. This leads either to the extinction of the weaker competitor or to an evolutionary or behavioral shift toward a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased in the maxim "complete competitors cannot coexist".[1]