Adaptaties

Adaptaties is the Dutch plural of adaptatie, commonly translated as adaptations. In biology, adaptaties are heritable traits that improve an organism's fitness in its environment, arising through natural selection. They can be structural, physiological, or behavioral. Distinct from acclimatization, which is a reversible change within an individual's lifetime, adaptaties reflect longer-term genetic change in a population.

Structural adaptaties include body forms, appendages, or camouflage; physiological adaptaties cover metabolic processes, temperature regulation, or water conservation; behavioral adaptaties encompass migration, nesting, or mating rituals.

Adaptaties evolve via variation, heredity, and differential survival and reproduction. Over generations, natural selection preferentially preserves beneficial traits, while constraints such as pleiotropy, genetic drift, and environmental changes can shape or limit adaptation. Convergent evolution can yield similar adaptaties in unrelated lineages facing analogous environments.

The term adaptaties is also used in nonbiological contexts to describe modifications of a work for a new medium or audience, such as novels adapted into films or plays. In that cultural sense, adaptation theory examines fidelity, transformation, and the reception of the new work.