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§ The system of biological sciences | 21
The qualitative and quantitative study ofa zoon should be viewed as a new
branch of faunistics, called ecofaunistics, and we do not think of it as
biocoenology, sensu stricto. Ecological faunistics, however, working with
masses, and studies of the relationship of these masses (and not of individuals)
to space, is to be viewed as a branch of synbiology. Still, we must call it
faunistics, because it studies the relationship between species (or species
representations) and space, and cannot be called biocoenology or zoocoenology,
which aims to clarify the relationships between populations to their associated
populations. Method-wise, ecological faunistics is related to biocoenology,
but they are not identical and, considering its aims, it shows a closest link
with production biology.
From the above, it follows that the groups stemming from the semaphoront,
the idio- and synbiology are not mirror images of each other, which shows
that organism and assemblage are not of similar value. Above the three sub¬
fields of synbiology, we must put synecology; be our interest material,
morphological or interactions, synbiology is inseparable from the research
of correlations. This study of interactions is so much the core of this science
that Schwenke (1953) declares this the central principle of this discipline,
and it is not synbiology but correlation research that he places diagonally to
autecology. According to his perception, ecology is an idiobiological field,
and synbiology (in his view, identical to biocoenology) cannot be pursued
using the same methods as in the former. Even though making interaction
studies the core of synbiological research is a remarkable advance, we opt
for keeping the old terminology, for two reasons: a) autecology itself is
intricately interwoven with interaction problems, and; b) the word synecology
is a better indication that we are dealing with the relationship of assemblages
to other, bigger assemblages. We can add that - as stated in connection to
biomes and biocoenoses - the assemblages are not necessarily bound by
interactions; they always contain intrinsic elements due to behavioural
requirements and, as these can be represented by populations with many
individuals, they unavoidably become objects of synbiological study.
Consequently, autecology always contributes to the formation of animal
communities, and occasionally becomes a synecological factor, even without
correlations.
Biocoenology, ecological faunistics and production biology, however, are
classified under synbiology, not synecology. This we must do, because the
former has a wider, more comprehensive meaning. In each three of sub¬
disciplines, there are elements that are biological rather than ecological. The
three fields are not on the same plane: for example, it is the precondition of
all production biological research that the operational representations are
first described by biocoenological or eco-faunistic methods. Consequently,
precisely to comply with production biological aims, the constant and
dominant populations receive attention, which is unsurprising, and this
sharpens the difference between the aims of production biology and