NCERT Solutions Curiosity Chapter 12 .2 Who All Live Together in Nature? — In-text Questions

Not for long. A habitat with only one kind of organism would break down quite quickly.

If all the organisms are the same, they all have the same requirements — food, water, space. There is no sharing out of the habitat at all: every individual wants exactly what every other individual wants, at the same time and in the same place. That leads straight to competition and to a possible scarcity of resources.

Worse, the jobs that other organisms do would not be done:

• if the one kind were a plant, there would be no pollinators, so few fruits and seeds would form;
• if it were an animal, there would be no producer to feed it at all;
• with no decomposers, the dead bodies would pile up and their nutrients would never return to the soil.

Two further things, both of which you can see in real ecosystems:

• Disease would spread very fast. Individuals of one kind are alike, so a disease that can attack one can attack all of them. Nothing in the habitat would stop it. This is the same weakness the chapter later points out in monoculture, growing the same crop repeatedly on the same land.
• Numbers would swing wildly. With no predator and no competitor to check it, the population would multiply until it ate out its own food supply, and would then crash. The chapter makes this point directly: without competition, one species could multiply too much causing an imbalance in the ecosystem.