Marine Sciences: from natural history to ecology and back, on Darwin's shoulders

Abstract

The naturalist Charles Darwin founded modern ecology, considering in a single conceptual framework the manifold aspects regarding the organization of life at various levels of complexity and its relationship with the physical world. The development of powerful analytical tools led to abandon Darwin's natural history and to transform naturalists, as Darwin labelled himself, into the practitioners of more focused disciplines, aimed at tackling specific problems that considered the various aspects of the organization of life in great detail but, also, in isolation from each other. Among the various disciplines that stemmed from the Darwinian method, ecology was further split into many branches, and marine ecology was no exception. The compartmentalization of the marine realm into several sub-domains (e.g., plankton, benthos, nekton) led to neglect of the connections linking the various parts that were separated for the ease of analyses that, in this way, prevented synthetic visions. The way marine sciences were studied also led to separate visions depending on the employed tools, so that ship-based biological oceanography developed almost separately from marine station-based marine biology. The necessity of putting together such concepts as biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is rapidly leading to synthetic approaches that re-discover the historical nature of ecology, leading to the dawn of a new natural history.

From Darwin's Origin of Species toward a theory of natural history

“…Ecological theory was developed with computers, with mathematical models and simulations, or in experimental settings [ 19 ], sometimes in bottles (like those of [ 20 ]), sometimes in micro- and mesocosms, or in the field, but only where conditions are conducive to manipulation (e.g. the intertidal or prairie grasses systems).…”

What is the ocean: A sea‐change in our perceptions and values?

“…Its huge physical size and depth long restricted scientists' access to the majority of ocean space, confining encounters to the shore, ship, or surface (Costanza, ; Lawrence, ). Most ocean research was conducted along the coastline, capturing only a fraction of the seas' complexity in its focus on coastal organisms, intertidal habitats and near‐shore physical processes such as tidal movements (Boero, ; Oreskes, ; Steinberg, ). For the majority of time that the deep ocean was inaccessible to scientists, it was common for it to be conceived of as unimportant and largely empty.…”

“…The wave of marine technological innovation that it instigated continues today, from autonomous underwater vehicles for seafloor exploration, to enhanced instruments for marine research, and improved camera and video systems (Gerdes, ). Deep‐sea submersibles and sampling methods now extend the reach of scientists to the deepest parts of the ocean, while satellite mapping has revealed the variability of complex ocean processes of current and eddy systems (Costanza, ), and fine‐scale water‐column sampling has illuminated the complexity of biogeophysical variations between the surface waters and the sea floor (Boero, ). Today, tools such as Google Ocean make these scientific data available to the public, allowing users to look at diverse aspects of the ocean, from the surf forecast to seafloor topography to the location of coral reefs and sunken ships.…”