Re: ...bats by day, and bats, birds, by night.

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> You seem to want to eliminate the distinction between
> niche partitioning and competitive exclusion.

AFAIK competitive exclusion is the process that produces and maintains niche
partitioning. That, according to what I learned in a lecture on evolutionary
ecology, is the whole difference.

>  I feel this is a useful
> distinction because it shows that organisms competing for the same
> resources can find ways to coexist.

Yes. They partition niches, they make two niches of what could be, and maybe
once was ("the ghost of competition past"), only one, so that they don't
compete for exactly the same resources anymore. And then they keep each
other out of their own niche. I like it when discussions break down to
semantics :-)
        Because of the above this argument is actually inapplicable to birds
and bats as a whole (my mistake). We'd have to find out for every single
potentially competing species of both how they avoid competition. There is
much more than one niche for crepuscular flying insectivores.

> How does this affect the argument (if at all):
> flying foxes [...]

No idea. They are neither birds nor pterosaurs. Or wait, this shows that
long times of flightlessness are possible for juvenile fliers and don't
automatically lead to a selective disadvantage, but I don't know what the
circumstances are, and nobody knows what they were for pterosaurs. :-|