What mechanism describes the survival and reproduction of organisms with traits well-suited to their environment?

Natural selection is the mechanism that explains how organisms with traits that are well-suited to their environment have a higher likelihood of surviving and reproducing. This process is driven by the idea that in any given environment, certain traits confer advantages that enhance an organism's fitness, or ability to survive and reproduce. Over generations, these advantageous traits become more common within the population as those individuals with favorable traits are more likely to pass them on to their offspring.

For example, consider a population of beetles where some individuals are green and others are brown. If these beetles live in a brown soil environment, the brown beetles may be less visible to predators, resulting in their increased survival and reproduction. Over time, the brown beetles become more prevalent in the population due to natural selection favoring their coloration in that specific environment.

In contrast, the other options relate to different ecological or biological concepts. Niche construction involves organisms modifying their own and each other's niches, thus influencing their evolutionary path but is not specifically about survival due to advantageous traits. Artificial selection refers to the human-directed breeding of organisms for specific traits, which operates under different principles than natural selection. Ecological balance speaks to the stability of ecosystems and how various organisms interact within them but does not specifically