This video, we're going to talk about character displacement. And so the long-term outcome or result of resource partitioning is character displacement. And so character displacement refers to the evolution of new traits between competing species in order to reduce the competition between those competing species. And the reduction of competition is favorable for both species since recall that competition is a minus-minus interaction, and so having less of it will be favorable. Now, a classic example of character displacement is the character displacement that occurs with the beak depth of these two species of ground finch on the Galápagos Islands.

And these two species are the small ground finch or Geospiza fuliginosa and the medium ground finch or Geospiza fortis. And the beak depth really just refers to the vertical height of their beaks, which is going to dictate the size of the seeds that these species are able to consume. Now over here on the right, we have these three separate graphs showing us data for these three islands, and all three of these graphs have beak depth on the x-axis and the number of birds on the y-axis. And so what you should notice is that island number 1 only has significant populations of the small ground finch or Geospiza fuliginosa. And so notice that the beak depth data is falling right into this region here, averaging right around 10 millimeters.

Now on island number 2, on the other hand, it only has significant populations of the medium ground finch or Geospiza fortis. And notice that the beak depth data is falling into a similar region, averaging right around 11 millimeters. And so these two species have partially overlapping niches, which can lead to resource partitioning, and we know that the long-term outcome or result of resource partitioning is character displacement, which we can see actively occurring on island number 3. And so island number 3, unlike island number 1 and island number 2, has significant populations of both the small ground finch, Geospiza fuliginosa, and the medium ground finch, Geospiza fortis. And so these two species with partially overlapping niches are going to be competing with each other.

And again, that competition is not favorable for either of them. And so what they can do to reduce that competition is character displacement. And so that's just the displacement of their characteristics. So notice that here in this region of the graph where we used to have data, there's now a gap here in the data. And that's because they've displaced their characteristics, where the small ground finch has displaced its characteristics so that it now has evolved smaller beak depths, averaging right around 7 millimeters.

And the medium ground finch has evolved larger beak depths, averaging right around 14 millimeters. And so this displacement of their characteristics creating this gap here, again, is going to reduce the competition between these two species, which is favorable for both of them. And this is what we refer to as character displacement. So hopefully, this was clear for you. Moving forward, we're going to apply these concepts and problems, and so I'll see you all there.