 Hi everybody. Welcome to Bio1B. Perhaps welcome to Cal Berkeley. For some of you, this might be your first lecture at Cal. And for others, perhaps your first course in integrative biology. So I'm the first of three lecturers as you probably are aware. During the regular semester, during the regular year, we have this course divided into three modules. And this year, ecology is going first. Followed by the evolution module with Dr. John Holzenbach and then the botany module with Dr. Bruce Baldwin. These modules can really go in any order. This is the first time that ecology has gone first in some years if it's ever gone first. So we don't have much to build on here for the ecology section in terms of our basic biological knowledge except what you bring in from your previous education. So I will occasion... I can't introduce absolutely every term and every concept as we go. I need to assume some things about your knowledge. I'll draw on your entire store of knowledge. I'll be mentioning far-flung countries or the occasional organism like an urchin. And I might just assume that either you've heard of that country or that organism or that you will tap it into Google and you will check on it. But I will try to speak slowly and clearly as possible. This course is difficult. Certainly. We don't apologize for that if it's hard, but we should apologize if it's confusing, unclear, or disorganized. Here we are, right? So they say the greatest public university in the world. So we're not going to apologize if it's hard, but it's our responsibility to make it clear for you. I'll primarily use the board just for writing terms outlining points, but really I'm focused on my slides in the presentation. And I will give you a subset of these slides as a PDF file that will go on to B-space after the lectures. One of the goals in Bio1B is to help develop you as good note-takers. That means coming to class and taking notes with an old-fashioned pen or pencil. So really try to do that. It's early in the day. It will be a struggle sometimes to keep awake, but there are going to be elements of the lectures that are not on the webcast, particularly videos I show and any comments I make during certain videos. And it's just a fact of Bio1B that the students that come to lecture perform better. They get higher grades. So try your best. Of course you're not going to make everyone. Let me just comment on a couple of other course logistical matters. I don't want to spend too much time on this. We have too many more interesting things to do. But I should point out that your book The Eighth Edition of Campbell is the one of this shade of maroon and black. And it's available at the local stores. I think Ned's is the only one stocking the book right now with such that you can use this coupon, this 10% off coupon. You can also find it at various other places, including online. The Eighth Edition is what we're using. And it behooves you to use The Eighth. I've given only the reading assignments for The Eighth on the course website. But on the PDF I just put up this morning on B Space. I do provide a conversion to the seventh edition, which some of you might carry from other courses. But they're not the same book. And I think you could get away with it, but you do yourself a small disservice by using The Old Edition. If it's okay with you, it's okay with me. I'll provide the conversions on that file on B Space. It's up there already. Make sure you get into the swing of B Space if you've never used it before by Monday. No labs next week, as Mike mentioned. You do have your discussion sections. And then a week off of discussion and lab. And the following week discussions and labs start full force. So we're easing into the semester nicely. We don't need to hit the ground running too fast here. Today I'm focused on by way of introducing what ecology is I'm really focused on the history of ecology. I tend to like to introduce topics from a historical perspective when possible. And I'm really doing that again, reaching back to look at the roots of ecology in order to give you an idea of what ecology is and what ecologists do. I didn't have much knowledge or awareness of ecology when I got to college. Partly that's because ecology has really taken off since I was in college. Ecology has been following an exponential growth curve. And there's a lot more awareness of ecology because of environmental problems that we face. But there's just an expansion within the science itself that is real that has occurred over the last many years. My high school biology classes might not have been up to snuff. That might have been part of it too. I'm not sure. But for some of you ecology will be a new field of study. And what I wanted to do today is to try to give you a sense of what it is. So we'll be looking into its roots in basic natural history observation. And we'll be looking at some examples of natural history and how it fed the ecological tradition and how natural history observation continues to feed ecology today. We'll be looking at some exemplars of that tradition, that natural history tradition. And then we'll start to approach definitions of ecology as we get into the 20th century. And we'll try to show that ecology is an integrative discipline. It integrates field work with laboratory work with theoretical and modeling work. And finally we'll draw a distinction between ecology and environmentalism with a couple of examples. Natural history. It's kind of old fashioned in some context these days. The idea of natural history. But at Berkeley it's still taken very seriously. Natural history. You can define it if you want as the study of nature in natural phenomena usually based on observation and description. We still have courses in natural history here in this department. Natural history is often dependent on very simple and patient observations of natural phenomena. Sitting in the field and watching an organism perform a certain behavior. Describing a plant in its growth in the laboratory. It's morphology and it's morphological changes through time. Natural history is not limited to the study of biological phenomena. To the study of living phenomena. If one were interested in the tides and their influence on the geology of the bay that would be a study in natural history. It encompasses the full range of natural phenomena whether physical, chemical or biological. But generally when we're using the term in biology we're speaking about a descriptive and observation based study of organisms and their relationship to the environment. We are fortunate to be living in the most diverse state in the country in terms of its biology. Here in Northern California around the bay we are very fortunate with an amazing local ecosystem in terms of its diversity and a rich history and a lot of resources for its study locally. If one were studying zooplankton or sharks or blue herons on the bay by observation and documentation of those observations whether photographic whether written or even without formal documentation at all one is conducting a natural history. But the best natural history does involve clear documentation and a careful recording of observations. In trying to elucidate the idea a little better we're going to go way back to some 30,000 32,000 years ago. K.A. here. I'll just note it now because I'll be coming back to it eventually. I'll have to erase this now. We'll be working very consistently at the interface of present time and past time at the interface of paleo and neo of the old and the new. This is just one of those cases where I should elucidate because you may not have the information at your disposal already what I mean by this idea. K.A. all I'm meaning is thousands of years. K standing for kilo and A for anum. Thousands of years. You might see me use capital M.A. mega anum millions of years. I have particular interests in paleontology and we'll be using the historical record consistently throughout the course. There you go for those in TV land. Watching at home. K.A. thousands of years. M.A. millions of years. K.A. in southern France was discovered only in the mid 90's. 1994 by spelunkers by K.A. enthusiasts. Not scientists who went into the deep recesses of one of these K.A. systems and discovered fabulous galleries of rock art on the walls of these caves. Now many sites like this were known in Europe and many sites around the world document the artistic activities of humans over tens of thousands of years in Australia and Africa. Here in these caves of western Europe you have exquisite preservation of the paintings on these walls as a result of the unique environments of those cave systems. So here at Chauvet when the cave explorers brought attention to this discovery and scientists went in they observed some paintings such as this. Panels on the walls you can get a sense of the scale from that guy's head of these horses. Something related to horses something in the family equidae you recognize them something horse like maybe zebra like something like that remember this is western Europe 30 to 32,000 years ago something in there. You not only have these panels of illustrations you have on the floor of these caves bones you have fossil bones. So you can start to interpret your paintings with reference to the bones and teeth and in some cases feces the scat the poo of these organisms. All of these things you use to reconstruct your knowledge of what these things are and what the people who painted these things were doing possibly thinking. A big panel like this you can see something like a rhinoceros here right pretty clear rhino form maybe indicating the movement the movement of the horns there elephant like forms here what are these back here behind the maybe baby elephant there what's that? It's a bear right you recognize it as a bear it's got the little ears it's got the short muzzle got the little face it's a bear darn it you recognize it because it's so well depicted it captures the features of that organism so well that it's just with these few strokes not only what kind of animal it is generally speaking but something about what it's doing this is an individual the person who painted this that's has made clear natural history observations during their lifetime there's no bear posing for this picture right they're going on their memory and their experiences of bears and these are not bears that are alive today these are a different species these are cave bears very common during this period in western Europe more vegetarian maybe than some of the big bears today but a bear nonetheless a member of the bear family what are those that were creeping up behind the baby elephant lions lions in France oh yeah maybe a subspecies of the living lion taxonomy as always is controversial the taxonomy the naming of these creatures at what level we rank them but they're clearly lions and taking everything into context it looks like they're in a hunt and you can even learn something about the behavior of these extinct populations of lions from these paintings because they're so carefully documented they don't they tend not to have big shaggy manes for example they don't have a big you know male king of the beasts lion mane maybe they didn't back then this group of lions maybe they didn't have manes in some cases it looks like the males are in the lead because the ones in the front have testicles perhaps unlike the lions today maybe the males took more of a lead in these pack hunting strategies where it tends to be a female lead strategy today you can actually learn something about the biology of these creatures as a result of the careful documentation and depiction of these organisms by these artists another point where I should just stop and it would be great to be building on the evolution section in discussing some of this but I should stop and note the structure of these names right this is just a common name that's our English name not standardized we call these things cave lions but in French they'll call them something else and in Japanese they'll call them something else we standardize our name for these organisms by using the Latin name which we italicize it's a good place to introduce this here because I'm going to talk about Linnaeus in a second Linnaeus right sorry I'm going to have to go to the board this is maybe a name you recall from a previous course Linnaeus Carolus Linnaeus he was actually born I believe he was born Linnae but he Latinized everything including his own name so we know him as Linnaeus famous for advancing a system of nomenclature the binomial system of nomenclature to bring organization to our naming of biological organisms and what he did was suggest that we use a binomen a two part name such as Ursus Speleus so that each kind of organism each species of organism would have a two part name like this comprised of a genus and a species the genus that we capitalize that goes first followed by the specific epithet that goes second that's not capitalized and if you're writing it on the board or on paper you should underline it if you're typing it you should italicize it and so if you ever see a name such as this with a capital on the first word and a lower case on the second word in italics you're probably dealing with a Latin name a formal scientific name a binomen that represents a particular species a particular kind of organism and you need to know this if nothing else by the end of bio one b just know that know that that's how you write a Latin name because you see it in the newspaper all the time that they'll capitalize both words and it just looks awkward and it looks amateurish and after getting through bio one b it's just you won't make that mistake okay so by way of introducing Linnaeus a little bit there let's look at Linnaeus' role in the history of ecology I bring up a couple of people here in part because I don't think they get the credit they deserve in the history of ecology Linnaeus' ideas were very interesting actually but it should be noted that these were what the writings we attribute to Linnaeus were not just Linnaeus' the historians have shown that many of his writings although produced under his mentorship were produced by what are something like graduate students and then their names kind of fell off the works over time and we attribute them all to Linnaeus right it's something that's been happening for a long time less and less as science continues but a very common thing in the past so we don't know who wrote the economy of nature specifically it was probably Linnaeus and one of his students in some combination but Linnaeus is the mentor in this process and this essay this brief essay on the economy of nature was translated into English and was read it can be very hard to find a copy of this essay and the other essays of relevance that Linnaeus wrote today but we have one of the best libraries in the world here in this very building where you can find some translations from the 1800's of these essays and you should go take a look for fun maybe not during the semester you're too busy but after studying some ecology you'll see just how foundational some of these ideas were of Linnaeus he spoke of an economy of nature a system of organismal relationships of checks and balances of nature that give rise to the patterns we see today and his phrase was taken up as we'll see in England by Darwin and others this idea and this phrase of economy of nature as an exemplar of the natural history tradition we can focus on a couple of individuals including Gilbert White who was very widely read his one book in particular the natural history of Selborne which went through many editions and has just been read by countless individuals since it was written in the 1700's where he wrote about the natural phenomena of his local area including for example the birds that lived in his local area where scientists were busy studying specimens in museums that were brought into museums and describing differences Gilbert White was out on the lawn watching birds and describing their activities and he knew he could distinguish certain species of birds based on their calls based on the times of migration that scientists based on museum specimens could not distinguish because they didn't have that living information about these features he documented all these things very carefully wrote them down and made contributions to science as a result of his patient field observations or here in America someone also who doesn't get much credit for his work at the end of his life Henry David Thoreau you may know Thoreau from just as a man of letters having written Walden or from political science with civil disobedience or something like this but Thoreau was also a very accomplished naturalist working in New England he was at Harvard wasn't really interested in classroom learning though focused on life in the field and observations of organisms and natural phenomena in the field more and more toward the end of his life in the last couple of years of his life he was making very important strides in a very concrete ecological framework but his journals from this time he died suddenly and his journals from this time weren't published didn't come to light until maybe 20 years ago he had no influence on the history of ecology don't get me wrong but he is a great scholar of a natural history approach of patient description of natural phenomena when I was a GSI in this course I was a graduate student here got my degree in this department and I was a GSI for this course and back then we learned that Thoreau coined the word ecology and in retrospect it's understandable that historians made that mistake to attribute to Thoreau the coining of the word ecology but in fact his handwriting was just terrible and a historian mistook the word geology in his journals for the word ecology and quite quickly it made it into the Oxford English dictionary and then into a New York Times book review and before you knew it everyone was saying oh my gosh Thoreau coined the word ecology but again it was an easy mistake to make based on Thoreau's work Thoreau he was interested in all natural phenomena but plants he was very good botanist he was very keen observer of plants he knew he would follow plants across the seasons the one that lived on so and so's yard just below the oaks before the first hill he would revisit a particular plant over the course of the seasons to check on it to check on its status and its life history it's you know it's stage of growth it's flowering times it's the time of its setting seed and he recorded all these things in great detail documenting carefully the days on which he was making the observations any contextual information of relevance and his notes were so good that scientists just recently could go back to them and look at the flowering times of these various plants in that region and compare them with the flowering times of the same species of plants today and interpret the changes in light of climatic change relying on Thoreau's careful natural history observations extracting the data from them and using it to provide insight into the role of climate in structuring plant growth over the past hundred years or more data there's a definition of data for you and just recall that data is the plural form of the word so try to say data are data they are the singular is datum right we all stumble on that once in a while but there you go Thoreau was reading Darwin but Darwin wasn't reading Thoreau no one was reading Thoreau at that time but Thoreau read Darwin and liked him quite a lot we've all heard of Charles Darwin who published his great work on the origin of species in 1859 in many ways Darwin is the most important ecologist of this era we tend to bow to the feet of Darwin Darwin the great in biology for his insights into evolution and we do so rightfully just an extraordinary body of work and based on creative insight and careful study both at home in the lab in the greenhouse and in the field on his travels and Darwin deserves a lot of credit for his role in the history of ecology this could be illustrated in many ways and I'm taking a very broad brush stroke approach to this history this is one way to think about Darwin's intellectual contribution here with his metaphor of a tangled bank and here's a quote that you can read on your time where he refers to this rich network of interactions in a tangled bank maybe something like this that he had in mind this picture here where all the organisms are interacting one with the next the plants with their roots in the soil with the earthworms moving through it and aerating that soil and providing a medium of growth for those plants with the birds hawking insects off of the branches of those plants and then defecating and returning some nitrogen to those soils which makes it into the waterways others which are taken back up by the plants this network of interactions really is what ecologists study ecologists study the interactions of organisms in relation to their environments and Darwin did this as well as anybody so soon after Darwin's great work a German named Heckel coined the word ecology here's Heckel in his younger years in the Canary Islands with a field assistant we don't think of him as a great field biologist he was an artist and a thinker but he is responsible for giving us this term he was a great coiner of terms and he derived the word ecology these two roots oikos and logos the study of the home what does he mean by home or house what does it mean to study the house habitat the study of the habitat of organisms or the place of dwelling the place of living the environment of organisms comprehensive science of the relationship of the organism to the environment quite a good definition in many ways from 1869 it's just one of his paintings there of mosses and various bryophytes he's quite a great artist let's jump to the 20th century ecology is not really taking its roots yet as a formal scientific discipline that really doesn't start happening until the 1960s but you are starting to get in the 20s positions in ecology at universities or in governmental contexts Charles Elton was a very clear thinking field ecologist from this early period here he is, he was at Oxford motorbike with a bunch of live traps to study mice setting off for the field but he did some he did very extensive work in the arctic in the far north and this is an example of a food web that he constructed based on data collected in the field food webs being a very important part of ecological science the studies of the interrelationships of organisms on the basis of their dietary habits and he opened one of his most famous books by saying ecology is a new name for a very old subject it simply means scientific natural history scientific meaning in this context systematic maybe quantitative based on not only description numerical description quantification basing our observations in counting and numbers and math bringing a more sophisticated method to our approach that could render it more scientific I'll talk more about Gauss, a Russian biologist later but just bring him in here to highlight that this pursuit is not entirely one of the field but it involves experiments in the laboratory laboratory experiments make contributions to ecology in very important ways Gauss was studying paramecia in a laboratory context with making formal experiments and deeply influencing the field we'll get to his ideas on competitive exclusion later we don't even need to do laboratory experiments or go into the field you could model systems on the computer simulation modeling and make contributions to ecological science but ecology is at its best when it integrates these approaches it's best when the models are based on empirical data from the field or from the lab and these three components field, lab and theory so let's get into more modern definitions of ecology and some that are very influential in the 60s an Australian ecologist defined ecology as the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms distribution and abundance spatial distribution and abundance the numbers, how many are there or what is their density the density of organisms or the biomass how much do they all weigh, distribution and abundance it's the scientific study of the distribution and abundance but that's a little static that's a little narrow as a definition certainly doesn't encompass the full range of ecology a little bit better is a definition that you hear quite a lot in an ecology course in an undergraduate ecology course Charles Krebs it's the scientific study of the interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms so you can use that as a working definition if you want you could use one of the older definitions that I've given you if you want hopefully you're getting a better sense of what ecology is let me give you an example of distribution and abundance the study of distribution and abundance is a fine little bird that lives in used to live in only in the old world in Africa there's one riding on the back of a wildebeest or something in their breeding plumage they have these nice orangey yellow plumes on the back of their heads they tend to use big mammals to follow big mammals as they move around and they pick up insects and animals as they walk as the hooves and feet disturb the ground grasshoppers and a lizard might get partially stepped on and the bird will go in and pick it up it forms this relationship with these other mammals this was an African bird and a well known African bird in the 1930s a small flock of these guys blew across the Atlantic and landed in South America an incredible dispersal event that was apparently well documented the arrival of this small flock and from that point of arrival in South America in 1937 they've expanded throughout the new world think about how that dispersal event affected the distribution and abundance of cattle egrets it affected it quite a lot across the globe in terms of their range and their overall numbers on a global scale let's take another example of distribution and abundance that's Australia and that's a kangaroo and it shows the limits of the range of these red kangaroos macropus rufus and the hotter areas here are the areas of greater density in terms of the number of kangaroos per square kilometer the limits of the range tend to correlate with what who knows the landscape there a little bit what are those limits dry areas the limits of the occupied areas are the driest areas of the continent those coastal areas are much wetter and maybe less variable in their in their aridity so for some reason the kangaroos are occupying primarily the driest areas the arid and semi arid areas why I'd like you to consider why after watching a video that I'll provide for you either at the end here today or I'll give you it as a stream online I don't want to take the time to do it right now ecology is not environmentalism the two have become so closely related that in the public's eye if you say you're an ecologist they might think that you are an environmentalist and they may be right because many ecologists as a result of their studies are led to action in a political context in terms of wanting to make changes that support a healthy environment but the two fields are not synonymous they're not equivalent ecology will speak of as the scientific study of organisms and their interrelationships environmentalism is will think of more as a socio-political movement to toward creating healthy and sustaining healthy ecosystems let's use Rachel Carson as an example of a biologist and an ecologist working in the field and studying organisms who was led by her studies to draw attention to the role of pesticides in the decline of bird populations pesticides particularly DDT at this time were causing the thinning of eggshells as a result of getting into food chains and making their way into the tissues of birds that then laid eggs the shells of these eggs were thinned to the point where they were cracking and many birds were having trouble surviving her book Silent Spring drew attention to this phenomenon and Silent Spring a reference to just how quiet it had gotten in springs that used to be rich with birdsong and this was one of the major catalysts for the environmental movement this is an ecologist who catalyzed socio-political action as a result of her scientific work so they are closely related but they're not the same thing just finishing the discussion of this early period this image alone is thought by historians to have been one of the major factors in the launching of the environmental movement when human beings saw Earth from space for the first time a spinning and fragile appearing blue planet against the dark recesses of space this image alone for many people triggered an awareness of our globe as a single and fragile home alright you guys you guys have hung in there well please try to come back on Monday have a great weekend