What is ecology and the importance of studying it?
“What does this eat?” was a recurring question my three-year-old son, who was fascinated by life around him, asked a few years ago. He would ask this question about any animal he came across. Although it’s a frustratingly common question for a parent who wants to instill more creativity in his little boy, this simple question is the essence of ecology. Ecology is the study of how living things interact with each other and with their environment. This includes what they eat and what they eat. Predators and prey, plants, parasites, and pathogens all use different strategies to conserve food and obtain the energy they need to survive and reproduce. These different strategies create patterns in nature (Figure 1-1). Ecology, at its core, is a science that seeks to understand biological processes that define patterns within the natural world.
Which are more than just consumption-based patterns. Living organisms compete for scarce resources and cooperate to gain mutual benefits. They express new patterns in nature.
The environment around them creates new arenas for interaction, and they are complex and changeable across space and time. Humans also shape ecological patterns and processes by changing environments and the numbers of organisms in them.
In my children’s early years, we used to frequent a small pond that was adorned in the summer with dragonflies and tiny twitches. My children noticed many different insects hovering over the surface of the water, which is a keen observation.
Biodiversity does not require a textbook introduction. After identifying what these organisms feed on, their next question inevitably is, “What is this called?” Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, was a firm believer that “names do not constitute knowledge.” This may be true in the strictest sense of the word, but my children understood and knew that their curiosity about the names of plants and animals led them to look for differences between them more. The knowledge that they are different species requires distinct names. The species followed, which led to questions like, “What do these do?” “Why are these always in the forest, while others are in the meadow?” and they began to distinguish these patterns. Patterns make the questions “What does this eat?” ecologically interesting. Taxonomy, the science of describing, identifying, and classifying organisms, provides the framework through which ecological patterns and interactions can be recognized and understood. Names open up new avenues for observation and research. Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist, but he would have been a lazy ecologist.The Selwood Park campus of Imperial College, University of London, where I worked, had vast meadows frequented by rabbits in the summer. My boys loved chasing them, though to no avail. But they suddenly stopped chasing when they spotted a fox slinking around the edge of the woods. The sight of foxes was a concern for the boys. They knew that foxes eat rabbits, but they wondered—with the explanation that they were seeing lots of rabbits—why they weren’t seeing more foxes? A basic law of ecology is that a fox needs a large number of rabbits to be a family. The available biomass, or mass of living things, decreases as we move up the food chain, from plants to herbivores that feed on plants and predators that feed on herbivores. The ability of consumers to build biomass depends on their ability to obtain food and how efficiently they can convert food energy into biomass. This is why foxes are much less numerous than rabbits. Rabbits were not as abundant in summer as they used to be. In some years, rabbits were rare. The boys began to notice that the number of voles, acorns, and beech nuts decreased from year to year. Some years, the apple orchard on the Selwood Park campus was so plentiful that the boys were eager to get to the trees before the graduate students there could get a fair share of the resources and the dynamics of the fruit. The boys were asking questions about the population decline. Why do bees land on apple flowers? What do worms do? Why do hedgehogs only come out at night? Why do sycamore seeds turn? Why do apple trees bear apples? These are all ecological questions.
What is ecology?
They are interconnected, but they also allow ideas inspired by ecology to spread through societal debates. As a result, ecology is one of the most widely used sciences in sociopolitical and cultural narratives. Ecological thought permeates diverse disciplines, including romanticism, spirituality, literature, and politics. It has become the motivational driver for modern lifestyle choices and political agendas. Ecology, as a scientific discipline, deals with the interactions between organisms and their environment. It is often easier to describe and describe these patterns, and it is easier to understand the causes of these patterns in nature. For example, it is well known that the number of species increases as we move from polar to tropical latitudes. How these patterns emerge is more difficult. Some theories seek to link species richness to the abiotic environment, or to energy availability, temperature, or rainfall. Others focus on the biotic interactions that promote coexistence. Diseases or predators may disproportionately attack more common species, or rare species may have special life strategies that facilitate their survival in a crowded and competitive environment. In both cases, processes that benefit and support rare species will usually support a larger number of species. Ecology is closely linked to the general framework of evolution, and evolution is essentially a product of the ecological interactions. Stephen Jay Gould’s series of essays, published in his book, Reflections on Natural History, is a reflection on the interaction between ecology and evolution. Gould himself was not much interested in ecology, perhaps because the historical evolution of natural systems did not see a historical explanation in ecological processes. Despite Gould’s indifference to it, ecology had a historical perspective, as the nineteenth-century geologist Charles Lyell noted. Geology, which is explicitly historical, is based on observable natural processes, especially elevation above sea level and soil erosion. By applying this historical perspective to the living world, Lyell opposed the static and largely ahistorical idea of the “balance of nature” and instead advocated the idea of continuous disturbance and change caused by ecological processes. This opened the door to a new interpretation of the.
The more dynamic nature of the natural world inspired Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and others to develop an ecological theory of evolution. Ecology is only understood in the light of evolutionary theory. Ecological outcomes are essentially evolutionary processes in real time. The continued existence of a species is the product of the way individuals of that species interact with individuals of another species and with their environment. To borrow a metaphor common to the theater world, the environment is the stage on which interactions gradually unfold. Natural selection is the director of an evolutionary play. Ecology is the spectacle.
Why is physics surrounded by admiration?
Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician and physicist, claimed that it is possible, from a theoretical point of view, to know the future of every atom, if only we could fully understand the present world and all its processes. Physicists are now well aware that randomness and probability are two indispensable facts of nature, and that chance is also embedded in ecological theory. Environmental laws are more probabilistic than deterministic. We may imagine how populations will spread within the available space, given the information available about the characteristics of the species, environmental conditions, and the availability of resources, but we cannot determine with precision where and when the process of spread will unfold, and which individuals will participate in it. Environmental laws are also based on probabilistic interpretations of nature, represented by statistical models. There is a long-standing mathematical tradition in ecology that has generated many insights into how groups and societies function, but the mathematical models in ecology are much less precise than their theory in physics. This reflects the importance of historical probability in determining ecological and even evolutionary outcomes. Processes and patterns in ecology are shaped as much by the legacies of what has been there as by current ecological processes. Reductionists argue that investigating the properties of the component parts of a system can provide an understanding of how the system as a whole works. While ecologists embrace reductionism in the context of their work, they also recognize that it cannot provide a complete understanding of ecosystems.What makes biological systems interesting is their “apparent” complexity. An individual organism is a complex functional unit with properties that are greater than the sum of its cells or organs. Likewise, an ecosystem has contingent properties that emerge from interactions among a large number of organisms and species that result in complex outcomes, arising from processes such as reproduction, predation, competition, mutualism, dispersal, and growth. Furthermore, biological processes interact across spatial scales. It is this interaction of parts and processes across scales that gives ecology its characteristic, that of a “holistic” science; we must take into account many aspects of a given system in order to understand its properties and outcomes.
Ecological theory
Because it reflects the difficulty of developing an accurate predictive theory based on universal laws in a field of knowledge that is essentially dependent on past events and disturbances. Despite this inherent state of indeterminacy in ecology, it is possible to identify several basic assumptions that support this science, on the basis of which theories can be developed.
It is clear that the heterogeneous distribution of living organisms lies behind the apparent patterns of nature. There is no equal distribution of species and individuals in space and time. For example, seaweeds and crustaceans on rocky shores occupy vertical ranges above the low tide line. These patterns of vertical division are the product of both biotic interactions between species and responses of species to the natural environment.
Biological interactions may occur between individuals of the same species (intraspecific interactions) or between different species (interspecific interactions). Species may be aggressive or beneficial. Species respond to variations in environmental conditions resulting from physical processes, whether wave action and coastal inundation, temperature drops across a mountain slope, or seasonal changes with increasing latitude. Such environmental variation provides the basic model of biotic heterogeneity. However, ecological outcomes are affected by the contingencies of sudden, stochastic events (such as a seed settling in a Nature is thus determined by historical contingencies, and ecological predictions are subject to historical contingencies.Across this dynamic biophysical environment, resources are limited and finite. Resources may be limited by physical processes, such as rainfall patterns that limit the availability of water, or the exploitation of resources by organisms. Thus, the ability of organisms to survive and reproduce in particular environments and thus determine their relative abundance and distribution patterns is determined by the characteristics of species and the strategies they follow to obtain resources.Finally, evolutionary changes are driven by natural selection, which is essentially an ecological process, and evolution shapes the traits of individuals and species that determine their ecological characteristics.
