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OCR
124 IVIL Zoocoenological characteristics that commands special attention during the investigations of a zoocoenosis. If we neglected this, we would follow a path that artificially isolated the studied zoocoenosis. A zoocoenosis is connected to its environment through multiple links, and one of the most important is through indirect kinship that, through shared populations, connects “our” zoocoenosis to others. There is no doubt that these links establish a certain reciprocity between the communities that have kinship, and whose effects should always be considered because they can be more important than the reliance on the same energy source. Therefore, one could question whether it would be better to categorise the zoocoenoses by these kinships, rather than based on energy sources. This, however, would hardly be acceptable, because the communities in kinship may be distant from each other and, apart from one or two populations that form the kinship, they have no other links. Most of the constituent populations have nothing to do with each other. Such a categorisation would lead us to the point we reached with the connex schemes, and we end up in amaze of complicated arrows, indicating the ever more tentative and accidental connections that link a community through kin that are also kin with another community, etc. Ultimately, these mapped connections would lead to communities so far removed in space and impac that the term “coenosis” becomes meaningless. The bilateral, indirect coenological link does not create a coenosis; it shows the direction whereby one zoocoenosis can impact another one. Such an impact can, occasionally, be substantial, and it can be necessary to assess its effects to explain the processes and changes in abundance within the coenosis, but the coenosis itself remains, despite the outside impact. A coenosis that is formed around a common energy source, that can be described and identified by its stable elements, and that is not fragmented by its kinships into one or more other coenoses, only goes to prove the importance of environmental factors; a coenosis can only be properly studied through taking account of its environment. Zoocoenology must view zoocoenoses through populations and not species, because the latter approach leads to an undecipherable maze, making the recognition of the coenotic categories impossible. § QUALITATIVE CHARACTERISTICS 4. The species identity of semaphoront groups In theory, there is no obstacle that prevents forming an overall impression about the coenotic relationships of a semaphoront group before identifying its species. The latter, however, is still necessary, and not only because science strives for full knowledge, horizontally as well as vertically. It is also a cognitive necessity to establish this first qualitative characteristic. The knowledge of the species is not merely a name - a useful shorthand in further work but
