Competition, competitive repulsion, and coexistence.

This manuscript is concerned with concepts rather than abstruse details or mathematics. Discussed are: competition; extended competition, proposed for competition in the strict sense, extended and modified by all related interactions including predation, parasitism, disease, and even cooperation, all of which can be "weapons of competition"; competitive repulsion, proposed for the sum of forces that determine spacings, including ecologic spacings, of individuals and populations; Darwin (biotic) equilibriums; competitive extinction, Gause's principle, limited and limiting resources, and single-resource competition; de facto coexistence of competing species, exemplified by green plants competing for sunlight; niche competition; the two concepts of competitive exclusion; devision of resources and of their utilizers; cause and effect in real situations; and niches, niche overlap, and coexistence. Stressed is the complexity of the real world, and the confusion that can and does arise from modeling it too simply.