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116 |VI. Methods of a zoocoenological analysis
the species spectrum, because had we left the developing animal in its place,
the degree of parasitism might have increased, with additional, new parasites
appearing. This disadvantage can be eliminated by taking repeated samples
from the same material.
The observations are suitable to detect animals that appear very rarely in
the zoocoenosis, or to gain data about the activity of the populations present.
An important disadvantage is that the identification of the observed
semaphoront is often limited. Consequently, we usually cannot avoid capturing
the species, if its identification is not possible while running or flying.
All these methods will provide us with smaller or greater amounts of
material. All censuses will provide data only about the animals present in a
given space, without clarifying the zoocoenosis itself. In the material, collected
by repeated and quantitative sampling, one or another species will be
numerous, while the presence of others will only be signalled by one or two
individuals. The material, once gathered, must now be analysed.
The aim of the analysis is to establish the relationship of the constituent
populations to each other, as well as to the habitat.
The first thing to declare is that we cannot fit all semaphoronts into
associative categories, and, in many cases, we cannot say much about their
relationships to the biotope, either.
We saw that the structural elements of zoocoenoses are represented by
trophic life forms called coeti. To recognise the associative category of a
semaphoront, we need to know its life history, because only this will reveal
its coetus as well as that of the semaphoront group. If we have no information
about this, the coenological evaluation of the taxonomically (or otherwise)
identified semaphoront will be impossible. In this case, we cannot say more
about the relationship of the semaphoront or the biotope or oecus, than that
itis present there. This occurrence, this existence, is not necessarily existential;
its co-occurrence with the other semaphoronts can be just co-occurrence
and not really living together: not a coexistence at all (Szelényi, 1955).
Thus, in our opinion, coenology is in error when a spatial co-occurrence
gets classified as coexistence. This perception necessarily results in dealing
with the species of striking dominance (not being able to interpret the
semaphoront groups of lower abundances), and the zoocoenosis of a given
plant community will be described by a list of these species. In doing this,
nothing more has been achieved than characterising the animal assemblage
of a plant community by its most common species. This is more than faunistics,
because not only was the species identified, but their abundance relationships
as well; this step is not zoocoenology, only “faunal statistics’, a kind of
faunistics that uses new parameters. By performing a continuous, quantitative
census, we get a better characterisation of the fauna of the studied plant
community, but not yet the zoocoenoses: the quantitative census is but the
first step towards this. It merely reinforces the known conclusion that faunistics
has established long ago, namely, that in certain plant communities, particular