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§ The system of biological sciences | 19
radically different units (du Ritz, 1921; Schwenk, 1953),their study, likewise
will give rise to two disciplines, different by methods and structure: idiobiology
and synbiology. We must also realise that, as we turn from an individual
organism (species) to groups of organisms (groups of populations), we face
the living universe. As we are unable to understand this in its full complexity,
we are forced to restrict our efforts towards smaller parts, which is also a
logical step, given that the living world itself is organised into identifiable
units. In these units, the plant cover and its animal “content” are evident,
and, to extricate them, we have three paths:
a) we can study the co-occurring plant and animal associations, determined
by identifiable rules;
b) we can also study the animals occurring in certain plant associations,
without considering their interactions; and
c) we can also study the qualitative and quantitative changes of the produced
plant and animal organic matter.
Thus, are born the three subdisciplines of synbiology; biocoenology,
ecological faunistics, and production biology. It is not a new discovery that
these three are related to each other, by various links, but we remain of the
considered opinion that these three subdisciplines exist, and they may support
each other, but it is undesirable that this support turns into a dominance
over the “supported” subdiscipline.
It is perhaps daring and new to separate biocoenology and ecological
faunistics, but we are forced to do it for the following reasons.
The two big realms of the living world, plants and animals, are deeply
different and, from this recognition, it follows that they have completely
different associational needs. From this, even though a physiognomically
identified part of the plant cover can be classified into one associational unit,
the same cannot be said of the animals occurring there, because the criterion
of an animal community is not merely spatial co-occurrence. What we see
here is a plant association and its animal “filling” When this group of animals
is not analysed by zoocoenological methods, but only through establishing
species identity and densities, we practice not zoocoenology but ecological
faunistics; in which case, the plant association is no more than the
instantaneous site of residence of the animal assemblage. Within the plant
cover, populations of various animal communities are mixed, and their
identification is only possible by using special methods. The bionomics of
plants and animals are too different to declare that their co-occurrence can
automatically pronounce them as communities (see Tansley, 1935: “to lump
animals and plants together as members of a community is to put on an
equal footing things which in their whole nature and behaviour are too
different”).
Among the coexisting animals, only a smaller or larger subset lives in
coexistence with each other and the plant cover and, consequently, all animal
assemblages contain two groups; one that interacts with the others, and thus