An ecological niche was named after the alcove that holds a statue
Niche originally meant a recess in a wall where a statue stands, probably from a French verb meaning to nest. Ecologists borrowed it to describe a species' place in nature, and have argued ever since over what that place really is: a habitat, a job within the food web, or a set of survivable conditions.
Roswell Hill Johnson coined the ecological sense in 1910, but Joseph Grinnell first put it to work in 1917, in a paper on the California thrasher. For Grinnell, a niche was the fit between habitat and behaviour. The thrasher, with camouflage colouring, short wings and strong legs, feeds, breeds and escapes predators by darting through chaparral underbrush. This view lends itself to broad climate variables such as temperature and rainfall, and it underpins most current forecasts of how species will shift as the climate changes.
Charles Elton, a British ecologist, offered a different emphasis in 1927: a niche is an animal's place among living things, its relations to food and enemies. In an oak wood, tawny owls fill the role of predator on mice and shrews; in open grassland, kestrels do the same job. Elton's version also stresses that species change their surroundings. Beavers need particular resources yet build dams that reshape rivers for everything else. Because such interactions play out locally, they are studied through detailed fieldwork.
In 1957 G. Evelyn Hutchinson reframed the niche as the range of environmental conditions within which a species can persist. Modern theory tries to reconcile all three definitions, though disagreements linger. A key prediction is that species whose niches overlap will compete until the stronger one eliminates the weaker, so coexistence requires some difference between them.
The concept also explains striking look-alikes. Ecological equivalents are unrelated organisms adapted in similar ways to similar places, like cacti in American deserts and euphorbias in African ones. Anole lizards on four Greater Antilles islands evolved the same set of body types independently, a rare showcase of convergent evolution and adaptive radiation.
Source: Ecological niche
