My early introduction to ecology was more accurately a romance, reflecting a young boy’s idyllic love of “Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My!” It was fostered by my grandparents, who took my family to tour Yellowstone and the Great Tetons when I was nine or ten, and further nurtured by my parents who gave me Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men shortly thereafter. Lopez wrote beautifully, weaving the natural history of wolves with their varied representations in human culture. From the evil, cruel wolf of Little Red Riding Hood to the sacred “Brother” of many Native American stories, Lopez managed to illustrate the disparate roles wolves play in our collective mythology.
Those early experiences and perspectives were with me when I volunteered on a project studying coyotes in Yellowstone shortly after graduating from college. At this time, a year or so before wolves were reintroduced to the park, coyotes roamed in large packs capable of hunting and killing elk. Of course, their success depended on deep snow cover and relentless teamwork. They were not swift, however. Instead, they were like a cat playing with a mouse, pestering their quarry to the point of exhaustion. This wasn’t cruelty. It was simply the only tactic available to relatively small dogs trying to take down a large ungulate. Still, it very much reflected Tennyson’s famous line: “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”
Wolves now roam the park, and interactions between predators and prey look somewhat different. The large coyote packs are gone, having been efficiently dispersed by the larger, more aggressive wolves. Still, Yellowstone is a place where interspecies conflicts remain on display. Visitors can once again watch wolves work together to subdue a bull elk only to be driven off by an aggressive grizzly. And such encounters are memorable. Early naturalists from Darwin to Audubon wrote extensively about the predators they saw. Given the engrossing nature of these accounts, it’s easy to see why so many ecologists have been curious about the role conflict plays in driving community dynamics (see SimBio’s Exploitative Interactions chapter). Indeed, my master’s research was a variation on the theme. I asked how predation risk altered pika foraging behavior and whether the resulting landscape of fear altered the plant community of the Beartooth Plateau. I enjoyed the work immensely in part because it felt like a return to my childhood. Studying pikas let me investigate some of the questions about the predators that had initially drawn me to ecology. And even if I couldn’t claim to be studying lions or tigers or bears directly, I did feel I had come full circle.
Of course, even then I knew that not all species interactions are adversarial. I knew that a lichen wasn’t a single organism but rather a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungi, one that benefited both species. But at that time, I was less interested in this fascinating mutualism and more interested in lichen’s role as reindeer food. In the years since, I have trained as a biogeochemist, which has changed my thinking. After all, nobody who studies the nitrogen cycle fails to develop a keen appreciation for mutualisms between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and legumes. Still, even after getting my doctorate, I’m not sure I realized how important mutualisms truly are. Certainly, I didn’t recognize that only 8% of land plants are complexly nonmycorrhizal. That only happened this year when I started more thoroughly researching mutualisms in anticipation of writing our new chapter, Species Interactions and Coevolution.
I have been lucky enough to spend more than 15 years writing interactive ecology chapters for SimBio. I’m lucky because each project has taught me something. To recall just one example, writing our chapter on Climate Change gave me a keen appreciation for how clever paleoclimatologists are. Whether they are looking at changes in isotopic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen trapped deep in ice cores, measuring the tree rings in the timbers used to build old cabins, or looking at changes in the frustules buried in sea sediments, these scientists have come up with some ingenious ways to peer back in time. That said, writing Species Interactions and Coevolution may have done more to broaden my ecological thinking than any other chapter I have worked on. This is because it forced me to take the time to collect stories about the myriad ways that mutualisms and other positive interactions—I’m looking at you, commensalisms!—affect ecological systems. Some of these stories, like that of honey hunters and honeyguides, were completely new to me, while others, like the relationship between plants and their pollinators, were not. However, the breadth of positive relationships—not to mention the sheer number of them—caught me by surprise. What’s more, the sum total of their impact on ecosystem structure and function was a revelation.
One of the reasons I like writing about ecology is because I get to share my excitement about the subject. I remain endlessly fascinated, both about how the natural world works and by the process of science. I hope that my enthusiasm for the subject is apparent in my work and that it has helped inspire some of the many students that have been forced to read it. But another joy is that it has afforded me the opportunity to read broadly and continue to learn. And rarely have I learned so much— nor had so much fun discovering what I didn’t know— than when researching Species Interactions and Coevolution. I hope you all enjoy the results as much as I do.
Ruling the Rock
