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OCR
§ 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 subfields 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 subdisciplines, 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
