James T. Tanner, ecologist

Ecology.

In the 1930s it was a fledging new science, an offshoot of biology. German biologist Ernst Haeckel created the term ecology or “oekologoe” in 1866, defining it as “the relationship of the organism to its environment.” By the 1960s the field burst forth into the mainstream, becoming a hot topic of research. It’s also a discipline that would grow to dominant Tanner’s thought processes in his later years.

Thirty years after his days in the Singer Tract, watching the affect of habitat loss on a single species, Jim Tanner turned his attention to the science of ecology. At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, he organized the graduate level program of ecology, serving as the its director from 1970 to ‘74, eventually writing one of the field’s early textbooks, Guide to the Study of Animal Populations, published in 1978 by UT Press. One anonymous reviewer noted, “The style is readable. In fact it is one of the few understandable texts in mathematical ecology.”

Tanner writes in his preface,

“The study of animal populations has taken two directions. One is the theoretical or mathematical study of population dynamics, beginning with the works of Verhulst (1838), Lotka (1925), and Voterra (1926). A second is the study of the means of manipulating populations for practical and economic goals. This is illustrated in Leopold’s classic book on game management (1933), in which he makes the subject of population characteristics the central theme of the book. Other examples of the management of animal populations are in fisheries, the control of pest insects, and the preservation of rare species. Both the theoretical and practical aspects depend upon an understanding of population characteristics and upon the ability to measure these.

“My purpose here is to describe the characteristics of animal populations, the methods of their measurement, and their interactions. These characteristics can be classed into those describing the population as it exists at some instant (e.g., density and composition) and those measuring the ways in which it is changing (e.g., birth and death rates). And example of an interaction is the effect of age composition on the birth rate. I have intended to review the important aspects of the subject and to describe the research methods most useful in animal populations studies, emphasizing those methods most amenable to statistical analysis.

“Whenever reasonable, I have used the concepts and terms of demography, a better-established science than that of animal populations. Good introductions to demography are by Keyfitz (1968) and Spiegelman (1968). This approach is limited, however, because data on animal populations cannot be obtained as in demography; most animals will not stand still and be counted, and individuals have no official identity, no birth certificate.”