Ecology

When you spend your life in the relatively safe and sane research world of single species and labs and climate chambers and greenhouses, encountering the mayhem of the natural environment and its biological communities – the real biosphere – can be chastening.

There seem to be patterns and even laws which science should be able to winkle out.  But it’s awfully complicated and, in the mathematical sense, chaotic.

There also seems to be a high degree of intuition required of field biologists.  A short walk with a good ecologist is all it takes to realise that there is great skill, maybe even an art, in reading an environment and its organisms.

In this sense, I’m no ecologist (chorus of “you can say that again” from my ecologist colleagues); but that hasn’t stopped me from having opinions about the subject, particularly when what I see going on out there in the wild doesn’t always square with what I’m told.
 
  Resources
 <  The great Darwin referred to the Struggle for Existence.  It’s reasonable to interpret this in terms of competition for ecosystem Resources.  But does this mean that organisms (plants in particular) just grab everything they can get?  I’m not so sure.
 
  Herbivory
 <  Having worked for many years on forage crops, I’m naturally interested by Herbivory, and not just in the agricultural context either.
 
  Heisenberg
 <  In my encounters with ecologists, I’ve come to the conclusion there may be two almost irreconcilable species.  The button labelled Heisenberg (the Uncertainty Principle man) leads to a brief rumination on the taxonomy (ecology, even) of ecologists.
 
  Habitat <  Habitat describes our local environment in un-ecological (nature study, more like) terms.