Ecosystems as Polyphonic Readiness Fields: 2 Ecological Niche as a Relational Cut

The term niche has always been a conceptual troublemaker.

It sounds like a location, a job description, a slot in an invisible cabinet of ecological roles. The classical image is that every species occupies a niche, and the ecosystem is the sum of these neatly arranged positions.

But niches are not places.

They are cuts—perspectival selections through a relational medium that no species ever perceives in full.

A niche is not where an organism lives but how it lives into a readiness field.

To grasp this, we must abandon the metaphors of partitioning and territory and turn to the relational ontology we have been building: where every phenomenon is an enacted perspective, every instance a construal of potential, and every living system a way of cutting into a shared possibility-space.

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1. The Niche as a Perspectival Orientation, Not a Container

Ecological textbooks often depict niches as multidimensional spaces (Hutchinson’s hypervolume), as if each species were a point floating within a coordinate grid of resources and tolerances.

But this misses the essential point:

the niche is not the grid, nor the point on the grid.

It is the act of selecting a particular orientation toward the relational field.

What the organism construes as food, threat, affordance, or medium is not an attribute of the world but a species-specific perspectival commitment. The niche is enacted in the moment the organism interprets a cue, responds to a gradient, or aligns with a rhythm.

If the ecosystem is a medium of distributed readiness,

the niche is the cut that makes that readiness usable.

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2. Niches Are Species-Specific Construals of a Common Excess

An ecosystem contains far more potential than any organism can access. Most gradients are irrelevant; most signals are illegible; most interactions go unnoticed. The environment is an overfull possibility-space.

Every species, then, performs a reduction.

A cut.

• The bat orients through acoustically navigable surfaces.

• The tree construes light, water, and mineral availability.

• The worm construes soil porosity and microbial exudates.

• The fungus construes moisture, carbon sources, and biochemical gradients.

Each of these construals defines a niche.

And each niche is a second-order phenomenon: not the world itself, but the species’ enactment of a usable slice of it.

The niche is not an object; it is a relation.

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3. Niches Are Dynamic: They Drift as Construals Shift

A niche is often treated as fixed, almost Platonic: the salmon has its niche, the oak has its niche. But nothing about the relational cut is static. As the readiness field shifts—through seasonality, species turnover, climate change, disturbance—so too does the cut that can be enacted.

Species adapt not by discovering new resources but by repartitioning the field of potential.

• A shift in predator density modifies the prey’s niche.

• A new pollinator alters the flowering plant’s niche.

• The arrival of a decomposer reshapes the soil niche for every organism above it.

Niches are not occupied; they are continuously renegotiated.

Thus, the niche is less like a shelf in a library, more like a path through a forest: a line of least resistance, reopened with each traversal.

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4. Overlapping Niches Do Not Threaten Ecosystem Coherence

Classical competition theory assumes that overlapping niches lead to conflict, exclusion, or divergence. But this presumes niches are scarce, rigid, and mutually exclusive—an assumption aligned with representational ecology, not relational ontology.

In a readiness field, overlaps are the norm.

Niche overlap is simply the indication that two species enact similar cuts through the relational medium. The question is not whether the cuts overlap but whether they destabilise or reinforce the shared readiness field.

Sometimes overlap strengthens coherence:

• Mixed-species flocks enhance collective vigilance.

• Co-pollinators increase mutual availability of flowers.

• Detritivores collectively maintain decomposition rhythms.

Other times overlap creates strain or collapse.

The determinant is not the overlap itself but the pattern of mutual constraint it produces.

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5. The Niche as a Site of Mutual Conditioning

Every niche depends on other niches.

Not in the sense of trophic relationships, but in the deeper sense of how one cut alters the readiness conditions for others.

• Herbivory shapes plant architecture, which shapes pollinator orientation.

• Predators alter prey behaviour, which alters plant recovery dynamics.

• Decomposers restructure nutrient landscapes, which alter all vegetal niches.

The niche is therefore not a property of the organism but a relation enacted at the intersection of many organisms’ perspectival cuts.

This is why ecosystems persist even though no one species construes the whole.

They persist because niches co-articulate one another’s preconditions.

Niches are interdependent construals of a shared potential.

Ecosystem coherence is the resonance among these construals.

An ecosystem is not the sum of its niches.

It is the field from which niches can be carved.