populations. When resources availability is high, bacterial populations become competitive and aggressive with each other, but when environmental resources are low, they tend to be cooperative and mutualistic. Ecological studies have hypothesised that competitive forces between animals are major in high carrying capacity zones (i.e. near the Equator), where biodiversity is higher, because of natural resources abundance. This abundance or excess of resources, causes animal populations to have R reproduction strategies (many offspring, short gestation, less parental care, and a short time until sexual maturity), so competition is affordable for populations. Also competition could select populations to have R behaviour in a positive feedback regulation. Contrary, in low carrying capacity zones (i.e. far from the equator), where environmental conditions are harsh K strategies are common (longer life expectancy, produce relatively fewer offspring and tend to be altricial, requiring extensive care by parents when young) and populations tend to have cooperative or mutualistic behaviors. If populations have a competitive behaviour in hostile environmental conditions they mostly are filtered out (die) by environmental selection, hence populations in hostile conditions are selected to be cooperative. Mutualism hypothesis was first described while Kropotkin studied the fauna of the Siberian steppe, where environmental conditions are harsh, he found animals tend to cooperate in order to survive. Extreme competition is observed in the Amazonian forest where life requires low energy to find resources (i.e. sunlight for plants) hence life could afford being selected by biotic factors (i.e. competition) rather than abiotic factors. Criticisms A 2008 study argues that the curse vanishes when looking not at the relative importance of resource exports in the economy but rather at a different measure: the relative abundance of natural resources in the ground. Using that variable to compare countries, it reports that resource wealth in the ground correlates with slightly higher economic growth and slightly fewer armed conflicts. That a high dependency on resource exports correlates with bad policies and effects is not caused by the large degree of resource exportation. The causation goes in the opposite direction: conflicts and bad policies created the heavy dependence on exports of natural resources. When a country's chaos and economic policies scare off foreign investors and send local entrepreneurs abroad to look for better opportunities, the economy becomes skewed. Factories may close and businesses may flee, but petroleum and precious metals remain for the taking. Resource extraction becomes the "default sector" that still