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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
