I thought a niche was how something helps out a certain area.
I’m doing a project and i have to write something on buffalo niche, anyone wanna help me?
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What Is A Niche? And What Is A Buffaloes Niche?
Posted on December 14, 2010.
A niche is the role an animal plays in an ecosystem, e.g. bees pollinate flowers, or foxes prevent rabbits from eating all the plant life in the area (by eating the rabbits)
I don’t know much about buffalo. I get the feeling your assignment is to research this, hmm? ;]
You are in the US, so I assume you mean bison? There are two species of buffalo, one in Africa and one in Asia.
The american bison (Bison bison) is a grassland herbivore.
An ecological niche is the role a particular system fills in an ecosystem. This typically relates to their diet, a well as any other habitat requirements such as climate, shelter etc. So a herbivore’s dietary niche is the kind of plants it must eat to survive, and a carnivore’s niche is the kind of animals it needs to eat to survive. For example a lion wouldn’t survive in a grassland where the largest animals were rabbits, because lions need to feed on larger animals to survive and they probably couldn’t catch a rabbit anyway. A koala wouldn’t survive in the desert, because koalas need eucalypt forests to get the food they require fro gum leaves.
Habitat requirements also include the temperature ranges the species can tolerate, how much water they need, whether they need shelter to breed or hibernate etc.
Since the american Bison is a grassland herbivore, they need wide spread plains. Since they are very large and social species, these plains have to be huge to provide the large amounts of grasses required for communities of large animals to persist. They have been able to survive in forest and semi-arid regions, but only if enough grasses were available to keep them going. Depending on the size, an individual may need to eat up to 10kg of vegetation per day.
So they have a wide variety of climates and habitats they can tolerate, provided enough vegetation is available. American bison are considered a keystone species in that they maintian large amounts of prarielands, which is required habitat for many other species. Without the bison eating grass and spreading grass seeds, over time these areas may become forest as trees begin to grow and the plains animals will die out if they can’t adapt to the new environment. Hence their niche relates to how it maintains grasslands, and provides a food resource for carnivores like wolves.