|
Arita, H. T.
2002. Community Ecology, in
Spanish (review of Jaksic, F.
2000. Ecología de Comunidades). Ecology
83:880-881. |
Jaksic
A., Fabián. 2000. Ecología de comunidades. Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile,
Santiago, Chile. 233 p. $15.00 (paper), ISBN: 956-14-0605-5. A dilemma that the textbook writer must face, as
Charles J. Krebs once stated, is “to plot a course that will place the book
serenely between the pitfalls of the past and the bandwagons of the
present”. This dilemma is particularly
vivid for someone intending to produce a balanced, objective book on
community ecology. Few branches of
Ecology have gone through such a shocking process of redefinition of
paradigms as community ecology did in the last two decades. The edifice of community ecology as was
known in the mid 1970s, a solid and compact body of concepts based on the
notion of competition as the basic structuring force, simply crumbled after
its building blocks were disassembled, piece by piece, by the sceptical
scrutiny of null models during the 1980s.
The last 15 years have been, for community ecology, a time of vigorous
reconstruction, a time for reassembling the pieces under new paradigms based,
for example, on the recognition of the importance of scale and regional
processes in structuring local communities.
In Ecología de
comunidades, the first text on community ecology written in Spanish,
Fabián Jaksic renders a personal, first-hand view of such a complex
topic. In doing so, Jaksic faces a
second dilemma, besides the one identified by Krebs. For years, Latin American ecologists have
complained that little attention has been paid in the international
literature to the high-quality research that is conducted in some countries
of the area. In writing his textbook,
Jaksic faced the challenge of presenting a state of the art view of the
discipline, but without ignoring the host of interesting research projects
that have been conducted by his Latin American colleagues. As one of the most prolific Latin American
ecologists, and after teaching a course on community ecology for several
years at the Catholic University of Chile, Jaksic certainly has the
credentials to meet the dilemmas of writing a Spanish version of a textbook
on community ecology. The book is organized in 13 self-contained chapters that,
in Jaksic words, are not arranged in a rigid sequence, thus allowing a
professor to accommodate the topics according to individual preferences and
the necessities of the course. The
first chapter is an introduction that sets the context of community ecology
in terms of its basic questions, its place in the sequence of levels of
biological organization, and its methodological particularities. In this first chapter, I would have liked
to find a historical account presenting the deep controversies that have
shaped modern community ecology.
Without this historical context, young students can get disoriented in
trying to understand the importance of some concepts, particularly those
related to competition. Chapters 2 to 6 and 10 deal with the classical topics
of community ecology. A substantial
portion of this section is devoted to ecological interactions, particularly
competition and predation, and to the concepts of niche and guild. Although Jaksic does an excellent job in
presenting complex ideas and mathematical concepts in a compact format, I
felt that the relevance of that information in regards to the central
questions in community ecology is not so clearly stated. The section includes also short discussions
on other interactions, such as parasitism and mutualism. The topic of succession is covered in a surprisingly
short chapter 7. Only four pages of
text are devoted to this important subject.
Chapters 8 to 10 cover the topic of diversity and the processes that
generate and maintain it. It is very
surprising that the word “biodiversity” and the phrase “biological diversity”
are not used at all in the book, and that the rich set of literature and
ideas derived from the concept is simply ignored. Similarly, although there is a chapter on
scales and another one on saturation of communities, the recent discussion on
the relative role of local and regional processes in determining the patterns
of ecological diversity is just superficially treated. The final two chapters are catalogues of current
ideas and future perspectives in community ecology. The author shows here a keen synthetic
ability and presents a succinct list of ideas that certainly have the
potential of sparking heated debates among students. However, the treatment of some of the topics
is too superficial and, in some cases, skewed to the author’s opinion. Does Jaksic succeed in placing his book serenely
between the pitfalls of the past and the bandwagons of the present? No, he does not. Then again, perhaps that was not the purpose
of the text. In discussing pattern and
process in community ecology, Jaksic argues that different authors have their
own opinions regarding what is known and not known about the structure of
communities. Here, a pragmatic Jaksic
retorts, “I limit myself to deliver my personal view.” A few lines later, the author states that
“the theory that explains most of the patterns [of community structure] is
the one of competition... with some modifications generated principally from
the theories of predation and island biogeography”. Jaksic does a splendid job in producing a text on
community ecology based on these premises, but in doing so he also presents a
skewed vision. Null models are
mentioned repeatedly, but never explained in detail or put in its central
historical perspective. Laboratory
experiments are dismissed and there is no explicit reference to modern
experiments on microcosms, which has added a wealth of new understanding of
community functioning. New concepts on
the role of regional processes are not covered, and although macroecology is
mentioned, only a few references to the exciting developments in this area
are made. Finally, there is no
discussion on the applications of community ecology or to the strategies of
managing and conserving biological diversity.
Jaksic’s book is a personal account, certainly a very well prepared
one, of community ecology. Does the book make justice to Latin American
ecology? Yes and no. Papers from the Chilean literature are cleverly
integrated as study cases in different chapters of the book. Without doubt, most of these examples are
world-class investigations closely related to the topics covered by the book. However, it would have been instructive for
students using the book (even Chilean students) to have access to the results
of ecological research conducted in other areas of A different challenge of writing a technical book in
Spanish is that terminology is not standard.
Jaksic, for example, uses the expression rama quebrada to refer to the broken-stick model, which in most
Spanish texts is known as el modelo de
la vara partida. Similarly, for
the first time ever I read about acuchillamiento
de datos (jack-knife method) or escalada
armamentista (arms race). To
circumvent the lack of standard use of terms, a glossary could have been a
useful addition to Jaksic’s book. Ecología de comunidades is, no doubt about it, a
welcome addition to the impoverished ecological literature in Spanish. Jaksic’s expertise and synthetic ability
have rendered a text that will be very useful for Latin American students
requiring an overview of community ecology.
I would recommend, however, the use of this book in conjunction with
other texts to have a more balanced and current view of community ecology. |