Wikibooks: Planet Earth/7i. Earth’s Ecology: Food Webs and Populations.

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Svalbard; Svalbard Archipelago; Norway; Lone; Huxley; Arctic Island; Spitzbergen; Tundra
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Planet_Earth/7i._Earth%E2%80%99s_Ecology:_Food_Webs_and_Populations.

=Species Habitat and Niche= Across the barren ice tundra of the island of Spitzbergen in the a lone fur clad figure hiked across the landscape. Located north in the Arctic circle the Svalbard Archipelago is a cold foreboding place inhabited by a scraggily few coal miners who make a scant living pulling out coal from ice covered mines to be shipped south. The islands are technically governed by Norway but its loose inhabitants come from America Russia and Germany to work the coal seams with a tiny tourism industry. However the islands are nearly unpopulated with so few human inhabitants making the islands ideal to study natural ecology arctic soils and the biotic world in a place so remote that it has been left to its original natural state with little human disturbance. This remoteness was what drove Julian Huxley a professor of zoology at Oxford University to come to the island as part of his travels of the world. Julian Huxley was the grandson of the famed defender of evolution and prominent zoologist Thomas Huxley. Following in his grandfather’s footsteps Julian had studied zoology and traveled to Texas to start up a university program in the United States but with the outbreak of World War I he found himself enlisted and back in Europe during the war. The aftermath of World War I found him back in his native England where he took the place of his mentor at Oxford Geoffrey Smith who had died during the battle the Somme in 1916. One of Julian Huxley’s pupils at oxford was and he invited him to travel to remote island of Spitzbergen to study what he could of the native life. Charles Elton was enthusiastic for the expedition but many viewed the trip as foolish since the remote arctic island was noted for being nearly barren of life with only a few insects and plants and few if any vertebrates. Nevertheless Charles Elton accompanied Julian Huxley and started his career in understanding the ecology of life. Elton was influenced by the question of how animals make a living within a community of organisms. The ...