Question

Ecology - Describe how environmental changes may produce behavioral, physiological, morphological, or adaptive responses in organisms?

Answer 1

One very interesting example (still being studied and debated, so please don't take it as accepted sceince) is white nose syndrome in bats. White nose syndrome is caused by a fungus - Geomyces destructans - which is spread from bat to bat, probably during hibernation when many bats are grouped in a cave for warmth. It turns out that, while almost uniformly lethal in American bats, the same fungus apparently exists harmlessly in European bats. Biologists have noticed that, when hibernating, European bats space themselves much more thinly around the hibernacula. Some believe that this is a behavioral modification to many, many centuries of outbreaks of highly infectious diseases (like white nose syndrome) which are only transmitted between bats hibernating close together