Chapter 2 Interviews

Ecologist Profile Chapter 2: Meet the Early Ecologists

As with the development of most scientific disciplines, many individuals can rightfully lay claim to be among the founders of ecology. A number of notable early ecologists, including Frederic Clements, who published the first American ecology book, and Sir George Arthur Tansley, who was the first President of the British Ecological Society and a founding editor of the Journal of Ecology are rightfully regarded as important pioneers in the subject but the three ecologists featured here have a special place in the early years of ecology.

Ernst Haekel

Ernst Heinrich Phillipp August Haeckel (1834-1919) was the first to coin the term Ecology, or Ökologie in his native German (Haeckel, 1866), although he was not the first scientist, or the only one of his contemporaries, to be thinking “ecologically”. A prominent zoologist and biologist as well as philosopher, physician and artist, Haeckel coined other important biological terms including phylum and stem cell. Haeckel worked extensively with invertebrates and was fascinated with embryology and development. He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and the two scientists met in 1866 on a trip that Haeckel paid to England that also saw him meeting with the geologist Charles Lyell, whose writings were influential in the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is notable that Haeckel, the first to coin the term to describe such an inclusive and interconnected science as ecology, was himself an interdisciplinary scientist.

Eugen Warming

Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (1841 –1924), known as Eugen Warming, was a Danish botanist who wrote the first textbook on plant ecology (Warming, 1895, 1896), and developed the first university course on ecology. Warming was well-travelled, taking botanical expeditions to Trinidad, Brazil, the West Indies and many European destinations in search of plants and to study plant communities, a topic that was central both to his pioneering ecological work and his ecology textbook. His book, Plantesamfund, was based on his university lectures and he was highly regarded as a teacher, lecturing and writing for university students as well producing textbooks for schools. Perhaps a reflection of the inspiration Warming gained through expeditions, he was a strong proponent of “field courses”; opportunities for hands-on learning outside the lecture theatre. Warming himself took students all over Denmark for field excursions and his notes from these trips were published as highly useful guides to those regions and habitats. Warming’s enthusiasm for field trips continues in the teaching of ecology today.

Charles Sutherland Elton

Many early ecologists, like Warming (above), Frederic Clements and Arthur Tansley were botanists-turned-ecologists. Charles Sutherland Elton (1900-1991) in contrast started life as a zoologist and went to be a founding father of the sub-discipline of animal ecology. Elton published what has become a classic book, Animal Ecology, (1927) in which he outlined many of the underpinning concepts of modern ecology. These include trophic relationships expressed as food chains, ecological studies of animal behaviour (itself still developing as a discipline at that time), life histories, quantitative representation of ecosystems and the concept of the niche. He was also the first editor of the Journal of Animal Ecology, founded in 1932. In later years Elton went on to develop niche theory, developing what become known as the Eltonian Niche, which emphasised the functional attributes of animals (later popularised by another prominent ecologist, Eugene Odum, as an animal’s “profession”) rather than its physical requirements (its habitat, or as Odum put it, its “address”). Elton was the first ecologist to make use of long term data sets from the Hudson’s Bay Company on the trapping records of Canadian lynx and showshoe hare, investigating and developing an understanding of the population fluctuations those records revealed. As well as a scientist, Elton was an important figure in conservation, especially in the UK where he helped to establish the Nature Conservancy Council in 1949.

References

Elton, C.S. (1927) Animal Ecology. The Macmillan Company, New York

Haeckel, E.H.P.A. (1866) Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanische Begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendenz-Theorie. Volume I: Allgemeine Anatomie der Organismen. Volume II: Alllgemeine Entwickelungsgeschichte der OrganismenGeorg Reimer, Berlin, Germany.

Warming, E. (1895) Plantesamfund - Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi. P.G. Philipsens Forlag, Copenhagen. Note, the German translation of 1896 become a far more widely read book.

Warming, E. (1896) Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie—Eine Einführung in die Kenntnis der Pflanzenvereine. Translated by Emil Knoblauch. Gebrüder Borntraeger, Berlin.