Fifty Years After the Homage to Santa Rosalia: Old and New Paradigms on Biodiversity in Aquatic Ecosystems: Santa Rosalia 50 Years on

ISBN-13: 9789400733343 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 246 str.

Luigi Naselli-Flores; Giampaolo Rossetti

Opis

produce well-documented food web patterns, instead of statistically inferring likely mechanisms from In an attempt to explain Why are there so many kinds these patterns. The ADBM is a model which c- of animals? Hutchinson (1959) listed and discussed, bines the constraints imposed by body size on many in his productive and fertile paper, several ideas biological variables (allometric of foraging variables) related to diversity of animals or the lack of it, with optimal foraging theory in order to predict including suggestions on possible mechanistic exp- structural properties of consumer-resource food webs nations. Later (Hutchinson, 1961) stated them explic- (Petchey et al., 2008; Beckerman et al., 2006). This itly for the plankton community, and another authors model, which according to these authors has been (i. e. Scheffer et al., 2003), following his trail until the proved successful for plankton communities, allows present time, have used plankton as a model for the us to determine the speci?c resource consumer links understanding of ecological diversity, and demon- and then evaluate the diet breadth for each consumer. strated that Hutchinson s ideas are still useful Therefore, it enables to test how much diets overlap nowadays. Among other suggestions, Hutchinson and hence to quantify the implication of the afo- highlighted the food web context to suggest that mentioned biological mechanism in structuring diversity of primary producers should allow ma- plankton communities in the ?eld."

Recenzje

From the reviews:

"The articles comprise a wide range of approaches from reviews to the results of specific studies which deal with biodiversity and its ecological function. ... They provide a perfect paper for the hasty reader which offers a general access to the topics of the book and makes it easy to identify specific articles for further reading. ... I would like to wish the book a broad audience also within the non-ecological community." (Dieter Leßmann, Basic and Applied Ecology, Vol. 13, 2012)

Spis treści

Foreword.- The influence of “Homage to Santa Rosalia” on aquatic ecology: a scientometric approach.- Linking traits to species diversity and community structure in phytoplankton.- Drivers of phytoplankton diversity in Lake Tanganyika.- Rarity, ecological memory, rate of floral change in phytoplankton—and the mystery of the Red Cock.- Diversity and community biomass depend on dispersal and disturbance in microalgal communities.- Influence of nutrients, submerged macrophytes and zooplankton grazing on phytoplankton biomass and diversity along a latitudinal gradient in Europe.- Why are there so many kinds of planktonic consumers? The answer lies in the allometric diet breadth.- Absence of predation eliminates coexistence: experience from the fish–zooplankton interface.- On non-Eltonian methods of hunting Cladocera, or impacts of the introduction of planktivorous fish on zooplankton composition and clear-water phase occurrence in a Mediterranean reservoir.- Out of Alaska: morphological diversity within the genus Eurytemora from its ancestral Alaskan range (Crustacea, Copepoda).- Does lake age affect zooplankton diversity in Mediterranean lakes and reservoirs? A case study from southern Italy.- Homage to Hutchinson: does inter-annual climate variability affect zooplankton density and diversity?.- Homage to the Virgin of Ecology, or why an aquatic insect unadapted to desiccation may maintain populations in very small, temporary Mediterranean streams.- Winning the biodiversity arms race among freshwater gastropods: competition and coexistence through shell variability and predator avoidance.- Stygobiotic crustacean species richness: a question of numbers, a matter of scale.- Santa Rosalia, the icon of biodiversity.

Blurb

This book celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of publication of one of the landmarks of the modern ecological thought: the “Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kinds of animals” by George Evelyn Hutchinson. Published in 1959 in the journal “The American Naturalist”, this article has been the engine which have moved most of the ecological research on biodiversity in the last half a century. Hutchinson starts his article by telling the legend of Santa Rosalia, a hermit who died in the second half of the XIII century and who spent the last years of her life in a cave nearby a pond. In this pond Hutchinson collected two species of aquatic insects and took the inspiration to explore the reasons why life is present on our Planet in such amazing variety of forms. This article thus inaugurated the season of research on biodiversity. Researchers and students in the field of ecology are the readers to whom this book is mainly addressed but also those involved in the history of Science will find in this book useful information. Issued in 2010, which has been declared “international Year of Biodiversity” by the United Nations, this book is also a tribute to the biological diversity allowing, enriching and sustaining human life.