A reference to species that develop members with genetic differences, which prevents successful reproduction with each other, producing a population that is separate from the original species: "When a pair of sympatric species live in the same habitat, they tend to exhibit greater differences in morphology (form) and behavior than the same two species do when living in different places."

"Sympatric species partition available resources which reduce competition between them."

"On islands where sympatric birds exist, the two species can evolve beaks of different sizes, where one is adapted to larger seeds and the other one to smaller seeds."

"When two sympatric species occupy the same part of a tree, they either consume different-sized insects as food or exist in the thermal microhabitat where one group might be found only in the shade and the other one would be in the sun almost all of the time during the day."

The process through which new species evolve from a single ancestral species while inhabiting the same geographic region: "Sympatric speciation events are much more common in plants, as they tend to develop multiple homologous sets of chromosomes, resulting in a condition called polyploidy (having one or more extra sets of chromosomes)."

"The polyploidal offspring occupy the same environment as the parent plants; therefore, sympatry; but they are reproductively isolated while the speciation is taking place via populations with overlapping geographic ranges."