Oldal 118 [118]
OCR
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
