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§ The work flow of the zoocoenological studies | 117
animal species are conspicuously common. These species indeed form
consistent combinations and create an impression of stability that may be
present at a faunistic level, but not at all in the zoocoenosis. We know that
the fauna of the forest differs from that of a meadow or a reedbed, or a field
of poppies, and the task of zoocoenology cannot be to prove this again by
using new methods of faunal analysis. The aim of ecofaunistics is to deepen
the knowledge about the fauna by unearthing these details.
This perception leads to drawing the border of a zoocoenosis where the
ascendency of the dominant species stops (see Shelford and Towler, 1925;
Balogh, 1953) and, in this case, the border of the zoocoenosis will, more or
less, coincide with that of a homogeneous plant community. A high abundance,
though, provides only one certainty: the population in question, as a
semaphoront group, is bound by something to that given point in space - but
this is no proof for a similar bind for the whole zoocoenosis, with all its aspects.
The zoocoenological school that, in copying phytocoenology, identifies
animal communities by their constancy and dominance relationships, commits
the logical error of categorising zoocoenoses by their quantitative characteristics,
and pushes structural characteristics totheside-lines; yet the co-dependency
between certain populations can only be clarified by these latter factors. These
structural characteristics cannot change, while the quantitative ones can,
from hour to hour. A further mistake of this school, is to hold that only the
spatial relationships are of importance (thus straying toward faunistics), and
forces populations that occupy the same space, but have nothing to do with
each other, into one zoocoenosis (e.g. moles and soil mites, bark-boring
beetles and roe deer, wheat stem fly and the poppy fly, etc.).
All populations have spatial relationships, but how these populations relate
to space, and chiefly, to each other, is by no means a question of quantitative,
but of structural characteristics. Zoocoenology studies associative categories,
not spatial distributions. Spatial distributions are only considered within a
given zoocoenosis. Space as an environment is important for a zoocoenosis
but is not identical with it, so, whilst all zoocoenoses are also studied in space,
this is not sufficient. A given space, if it is a biotope, can have a zoocoenosis,
and a zoocoenosis will certainly have a spatial component, but neither can a
biotope be delimited by a zoocoenosis (as it remains a biotope even without
a coenosis, at most an unused one), and the limits of a biotope are not those
of a zoocoenosis, because a zoocoenosis is composed of populations, and only
these can have spatial borders. This is not changed by the fact that a border
of some zoocoenoses does not extend beyond that of a biotope or oecus.
With these caveats, let us attempt a zoocoenological analysis of a given
part of an animal assemblage.