Ecology in Action

INTRODUCTION

In his autobiography, E. O. Wilson writes, “Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. They made me suffer, but I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions [ … ] James Dewey Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, served as one such adverse hero for me. I found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met.” (Wilson 1994). Wilson and Watson began their careers as Harvard assistant professors in the same year, both while in their 20s. Wilson describes Watson as ill-mannered, and overtly contemptuous of anybody who did not believe, as Watson did, that all important questions in biology would ultimately be answered by molecular biologists, and that traditional biologists were merely stamp collectors, who collected natural history observations but did not know what to do with them.

Trapped in this very contentious departmental atmosphere, Wilson had a few choices. One was to attempt to split the department into two faculty groups that could work separately on different types of questions, with molecular biologists looking at small-scale processes and ecologists and evolutionary biologists investigating biological processes that operated on a larger scale. A second was to go back to the tropics to continue his fieldwork on a variety of tropical ants that lived on islands off the coast of Venezuela, and on mainland South America. A third option, which Wilson chose, was to fight back and create a modern vision for “mainstream biology” by teaming up with like-minded faculty members at other universities who were facing similar conflicts. This chapter begins with a discussion of how Wilson and Robert MacArthur formed a fruitful partnership that stimulated the development of the field of geographic ecology. We then apply island biogeography theory to make predictions of species richness and species turnover within ecosystems. Given that Earth's geography is everchanging, we then consider how historical events can help explain the current distribution of a species or taxonomic group. Finally, in recognition that geographic features are spatially variable, we explore how landscape structure, including landscape scale, fragmentation, and edge effects, influences the distribution and abundance of species.