Virginia SOL EC.6

What students need to be able to do

• Make, support, and evaluate a claim about how natural selection leads to adaptations in species and increases ecosystem biodiversity.
• Describe the behavioral and physiological adaptations that plants and animals have developed to survive in diverse ecosystems.
• Make, support, and evaluate a claim about the roles of adaptive and non-adaptive forces in speciation and biodiversity.
• Research a real-world example of an organism's adaptation to an evolving environment.
• Make, support, and evaluate a claim about how species interactions and adaptations are a response to selective pressures.
• Research real-world structural and behavioral adaptations used by predators and prey for survival.
• Make, support, and evaluate a claim about how ecological niches and resource partitioning affect interactions within communities.
• Explain the role predation plays in population size within an ecosystem and differentiate forms of predation.