Robert MacArthur’s work with wood warblers is a well known example. He found five species of wood warbler living and raising offspring in the same woods. All fed on insects gleaned from surfaces or caught in flight and in general used resources in ways that seemed very similar, an apparent violation of the competitive exclusion principle. MacArthur watched the warblers carefully and monitored their foraging habits. He found that each species had a unique pattern of foraging in a tree. One foraged primarily at the tops of the trees, another near the ground, others in the middle of the trees, some toward the trunk, others toward the branch tips. He found that their foraging behaviors differed in other ways as well. In other words, the species shared resources, and avoided competitive exclusion, by foraging in different microhabitats and employing different foraging behaviors. Differently stated, each species may have been competitively excluding the others from its foraging microhabitat, thus allowing coexistence in the larger habitat; with the use of different foraging techniques enhancing resource sharing. A large number of similar studies have supported the competitive exclusion principle, though some have seemed to refute it.
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