Arches, keystones and star fish.

I learned today of the death of an eminent ecologist;  Robert Treat Paine III,
April 13, 1933 – June 13, 2016

What follows is an extract from his obituary on the University of Washington website. You can read the full obituary here.

"Dr. Robert (Bob) Paine holds iconic status within ecology, and his death brings both immense loss and a reminder that he will always be with us through his shaping of ecological ideas and practices.

He is justly famous for coining the term “keystone species” in reference to predators whose effects indirectly maintain the diversity, structure, and functioning of ecological communities. Like the keystone in an arch, these species hold a system together. Bob’s field study of a keystone species is so familiar as a textbook example that it hardly needs repeating: When he removed ochre starfish from a rocky shoreline, mussels began to monopolize space, halving the number of species attached to the rocks. The description of the rocky shore food web, originally published in 1966 (with the keystone term appearing in a subsequent paper), has been cited several thousand times and reprinted as one of the key papers in the development of the discipline in “Foundations of Ecology” (1991)."

Tatoosh Island, where the study was carried out is shown on the map. 


The two granite arches with their keystones in the photograph are part of our village hall which was built in 1890.