Limiting factors are conditions necessary for a species that become deficient or absent in a habitat, causing death or inhibited fertility. Examples include food, water, predation, shelter, gases, and organic chemicals. A limiting factor can prevent uncontrolled growth or cause a population to decline. They can be beneficial to ecosystems, such as controlling predator populations to prevent prey depletion. Lack of predation can also become a limiting factor, as seen with invasive species. People have become a limiting factor for native wolves in the northeastern United States due to the disappearance of their prey, resulting in additional factors such as food scarcity and disease.
A limiting factor refers to any condition required by a species that becomes deficient or absent in a habitat. When particular needs are not met, individuals in the population begin to die or fertility is inhibited. Some common examples of limiting factors are food, water, predation or lack thereof, water, shelter, gases such as oxygen, and organic chemicals. In some cases, a limiting factor may refer to too abundant a condition such as excessive sunlight for a particular plant species. It functions as a control that prevents the uncontrolled growth of a population or can cause a population to decline and disappear from a habitat.
More often than not, a limiting factor is beneficial to an ecosystem. For example, one who controls one species, such as a predator, may in turn benefit another as its prey. If predator species were not controlled, prey species would become severely depleted. Furthermore, the success of predatory species would eventually result in their overpopulation which would ultimately result in a number of limiting factors for that group. We have seen this in the case of overhunting where people were responsible for the extinction of the dodo bird and other animals.
Sometimes, a predatory species is not controlled by a limiting factor and as such becomes such a condition for another species. Similarly, a lack of predators in a habit can limit a species. Both cases are particularly true in the case of introduced or invasive species. An invasive species that has no natural prey can rapidly establish large populations which results in competition with native species for food and habitat.
For example, in the northeastern United States, people have become an extreme limiting factor in regards to native wolves. One of the wolves’ native prey is deer whose population has grown due to the disappearance of their predator. Lack of predation becomes a limiting factor because their uncontrolled population growth results in additional factors such as food scarcity and disease. Additionally, people have had problems with overpopulation when road-related deer become a driving hazard or a garden pest.
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