Philip Scarborough, age 13, of Henderson, Nev., for his question:
WHAT EXACTLY IS ECOLOGY AND WHAT DOES AN ECOLOGIST DO?
Ecology is the branch of biology that deals with the relationships living things have to each other and to their environment or surroundings. No living thing, be it animal or plant, can live alone. Every living thing depends in some way upon certain other living and nonliving things.
The study of ecology increases man's understanding of the world and all its creatures. This is important because man's survival and well being depend on relationships that exist on a worldwide basis. Changes in distant parts of the world affect us and our environment.
Scientists who specialize in studying the relationships living things have to each other and to their environment are called ecologists. One of the most important goals of the ecologist is to intelligently manage and control the living and nonliving things in the world.
Ecologists study air and water pollution and how dirty air and water affect life. They also try to foresee possible environmental problems, such as crop losses or losses in animal life that building a dam or straightening a river channel may cause.
The rate at which man is using up such natural resources as coal, gas and oil are of concern to the ecologist. Along with many other scientists, ecologists are searching for ways to use sunlight and atomic energy for fuel and power.
Ecologists also are concerned about the world's increasing population and its decreasing food supply. With marine biologists, they are trying to find new ways to producing food from the sea.
Ecologists must depend often on other sciences such as climatology, meteorology, geology and oceanography to learn about air, land and water environments. Then must also have knowledge from many different fields of study including physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science.
Ecologists are scientists concerned with the organization of nature. They study a whole problem rather than just one part of it. They may study the structure of an individual organism and how it acts but they do this to learn about all the organisms like it and their relations with other organisms and environments.
Each branch of biology deals with different levels of organization in the living world. Ecologists divide the living world into three main areas: populations, natural communities of organism and ecosystems.
A population is a group of the same species or kind of organism that lives in an area at the same time.
A community is a group of animal and plant populations living together in the same environment.
An ecosystem is the most complex level of organization in nature. It is made up of communities and their abiotic or nonliving, physical environments, such as climate, soil and water.