∞ generated and posted on 2016.08.29 ∞
Antagonism between organisms that is both indirect and over resources.
The indirectness of exploitative competition is in contrast to when two competing organisms are physically interacting. With exploitative competition what instead is going on is that when one organism obtains one unit of resource, say a mouthful of food or a day's worth of photons from the sun, those resources simultaneously cannot be available to another, competitor organism.
Given exploitative competition the growth rates and/or carrying capacities for the each of the two competingspecies will be less than would be the case given a lack of such competition.