Maladaptation

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The state of being poorly adapted to an environment. countable, uncountable

    "It suggests that species interactions are likely to be in continual flux as they evolve in different ways in different populations, that local maladaptation may be an occasional and important outcome of continuing coevolution between species, and that few coevolved traits will spread across the entire geographic range of interacting species."

Example

More examples

"It suggests that species interactions are likely to be in continual flux as they evolve in different ways in different populations, that local maladaptation may be an occasional and important outcome of continuing coevolution between species, and that few coevolved traits will spread across the entire geographic range of interacting species."

Etymology

From mal- + adaptation.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.