The article "The Ecology of Individuals: Incidence and Implications of Individual Specialization" by Daniel I. Bolnick, Richard Svanbäck, James A. Fordyce, Louie H. Yang, Jeremy M. Davis, C. Darrin Hulsey, and Matthew L. Forister reviews the prevalence and significance of individual specialization in ecological studies. The authors challenge the common assumption that conspecific individuals are ecologically equivalent, arguing that individual specialization is widespread and can significantly impact population dynamics, evolution, and conservation. They define individual specialization as the degree to which an individual's niche is narrower than the population's overall niche, not attributable to sex, age, or discrete morphological groups. The article presents 93 species across various taxonomic groups as examples of individual specialization, highlighting that between-individual variation can sometimes dominate the population's niche width. The degree of specialization varies widely among species and populations, influenced by physiological, behavioral, and ecological mechanisms. The authors discuss the implications of individual specialization for frequency-dependent interactions, intraspecific competition, fitness-function shapes, and population diversification. They also explore the causes of individual specialization, including trade-offs in resource recognition, search efficiency, and functional morphology, and the role of environmental heterogeneity and social interactions. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to consider both fundamental and realized niches when studying individual specialization.The article "The Ecology of Individuals: Incidence and Implications of Individual Specialization" by Daniel I. Bolnick, Richard Svanbäck, James A. Fordyce, Louie H. Yang, Jeremy M. Davis, C. Darrin Hulsey, and Matthew L. Forister reviews the prevalence and significance of individual specialization in ecological studies. The authors challenge the common assumption that conspecific individuals are ecologically equivalent, arguing that individual specialization is widespread and can significantly impact population dynamics, evolution, and conservation. They define individual specialization as the degree to which an individual's niche is narrower than the population's overall niche, not attributable to sex, age, or discrete morphological groups. The article presents 93 species across various taxonomic groups as examples of individual specialization, highlighting that between-individual variation can sometimes dominate the population's niche width. The degree of specialization varies widely among species and populations, influenced by physiological, behavioral, and ecological mechanisms. The authors discuss the implications of individual specialization for frequency-dependent interactions, intraspecific competition, fitness-function shapes, and population diversification. They also explore the causes of individual specialization, including trade-offs in resource recognition, search efficiency, and functional morphology, and the role of environmental heterogeneity and social interactions. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to consider both fundamental and realized niches when studying individual specialization.