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How the Environment Influences the Body Plan of an Organism

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"How does the Environment Influence the Body Plans of Organisms."

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Solution Summary

Here we go through the circular relationship between an organism's body plan and its environment. How does the environment shape the body plan of an organism? How does the organism's unique adaptations to its environment help it to meet its basic requirements of survival? These are some of the questions we help to answer here, in essay form.

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This will be interesting, since it is a very interesting topic. If we start from first principles, we know that all organisms have some very basic needs:

1. find food
2. breathe (AKA gas exchange, usually oxygen or CO2 for plants)
3. have some space to live in
4. move around (some exceptions, e.g. clams)
5. reproduce

The body plan of an organism is what allows the organism to meet these needs. For example, a bat has big ears and a strange way of vocalizing so that it can echo-locate and find food. See the image I attached (from planet-science.com).

In order to meet these needs the organism MUST interact with its environment. Therefore, the environment helps determine what body plan the organism has in order to meet that need. For example, a fish has gills to breath oxygen in water because it lives in ...

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