History of Ecological Sciences, Part 64: History of Physiological Ecology of Animals

Part 64 is about expanding the scope of animal physiology beyond the study of humans and white rats. Why is this subject not called ecological physiology? There is a subject, comparative physiology, that is similar in several respects to physiological ecology. It was already a mature part of physiology in 1950, when C. Ladd Prosser (1907–2002) published the first edition of Comparative Animal Physiology (edition 2, 1961, with Frank Brown [b. 1930]). Australian entomologists H.G. Andrewartha and L.C. Birch published “The History of Insect Ecology,” in which they devoted 11 pages to “Ecological Physiology” (1973). They began that section with studies on the relationship between temperature and rapidity of insect development. The first such investigation was by the most influential French student of insects during the 1700s, René‐Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757). He also developed the thermometer, and it was natural for him to wonder about the influence of temperature upon rates at which immature insects developed (Gough 1975, Drouin 1995, Egerton 2006, 2012). He first published on this in 1735. Physiological ecologists were still interested in this topic during the 1900s (Andrewartha and Birch 1973). Martin Feder et al. edited New Directions in Ecological Physiology (1987). A contributor in that volume, Albert Bennett, stated: “The primary task and subject of the field known as ecological physiology (or physiological ecology or environmental physiology) is to understand how animals are designed with reference to their environments and evolutionary histories” (1987:1). The different names used for this subject have been discussed more recently by two ecologists (Hagen 2015; B. K. McNab, personal communication). Ecologists and physiologist are likely to prefer different names. Plant ecologists began studying physiological ecology of plants long before animal ecologists did so of animals. Dwight Billings began his “The Historical Development of Physiological Plant Ecology” (1985) with the discovery of photosynthesis in the 1770s in Western Europe. Much later, Frederic Clements had a “Vision of a Unified Physiological Ecology” (Hagen 1988). Malcolm Nicolson found that “Physiological ecology constituted a major programme of research within American plant ecology in the early decades of the twentieth century” (1990:109). Since there were decades between the origin of one and the origin of the other, this seems to indicate there was no influence in this instance of plant ecology on animal ecology. Minnesotan Raymond L. Lindeman (1915–1942) earned his