Jenessa Kay
April 23, 2013
Community Ecology
Nature Education, 2012

 Born in Cambridge, MA – April 13,1933
 Happy belated birthday!
 AB - Harvard University, 1954
 Army Battalion Gardener
Kinne (ed.), 1994
 PhD - University of Michigan, 1961
 Post-doc, Scripps Institute of Oceanography
 Professor of Zoology, University of Washington
1962 – 1998
 Current Professor emeritus of Zoology, UW

 1979-80 – President of Ecological
Society of America
 1983 – MacArthur Award (ESA)
 1989 – Excellence in Ecology Prize
(Ecology Inst. in Oldendorf am Luhe,
Germany
 1997 – Sewall Wright Award (Society of
American Naturalists)
 2000 – Eminent Ecologist Award
Scientific American, 2010

Cited by 3652
Cited by 920
Cited by 776
Cited by 1178
BioScience, Vol. 46, No. 8 (Sep., 1996)
Cited by 1017

 Predation Hypothesis and
Competitive Hierarchies
 Food Web Interactions and
Trophic Cascades
 Quantifying interaction strengths and patch dynamics
 Keystone Species Concept marinebio.net
Why don’t we have monocultures of good competitors??

The New York Times, 2012
Kevin Schafer

makah.com
 Makah Bay – mainland WA
 Tatoosh Island - 0.5 miles offshore from Cape Flattery
 Part of Makah Reservation
 Longest ongoing study of a single area by the same scientist in the U.S.
Superstock.com

wikimedia.com
legendsofamerica.com
history.noaa.gov (1943)

“Whether I was stupid or foolhardy, I spent my first ten years in the intertidal in sneakers – cheap as possible.” scientificamerican.com
“I have too good peripheral circulation.”

The New York Times, 2012

“His intellectual presence is so commanding that his physical presence hardly registers.” naturalhistoriesproject.org

“If you ask him a question…y ou feel the weight of an encyclopedic knowledge of scientific and natural history gathering behind his response.” naturalhistoriesproject.org

“What would happen if we removed the top predator from an ecosystem?” naturalhistoriesproject.org

asnailodyessy.com
Nature, 2010
California Academy of Sciences
“I’ve always thought of myself as a wader due to my size.”

 Changed ecology from an observational to an experimental science
 3 years on Makah Bay
 8 x 2 m plots
 Removal of Pisaster ochraceus
 Unmanipulated control
 Transect lines to measure density of resident macroinvertebrates and benthic algae scientificamerican.com
Bruno, 2007 ppt

 Previously, thought diversity = ecosystem stability
 “Stability increases as the number of links increase” (MacArthur,
1955)
 “A rich fauna and flora…tends to be very stable because of multiplicity of ecological checks and balances”
(Watt, 1964)
 Paine – absence of one individual can shift entire population into monoculture
 Species richness decreased from
15 to 8 online.santarosa.edu

Nature Education, 2010
Paine, 1966

 Loss can initiate trophic cascades: the rise and fall of connected species throughout the food web

 Predators – Sea Otters, Gray Wolves
 Prey
 Mutualists – hummingbirds
 Hosts – Saguaro cactus
 Parasites
 Modifiers – N. American Beaver
 Pollinators
 Where does it end?

 Challenges include context dependency and diversity dictating keystone status
 1994 – United Nations’ Global Biodiversity
Assessment met to identify issues and challenges with keystone species concept
 9 “keystone cops” including Paine, Tilman,
Mary Power, Bruce Menge
 Written as discussion between “Dr. Knowitall,”
“Empiricist” and “Skeptic”

Goodness gracious, it’s Pisaster ochraceus

Marian Kohn, 1999 (Nature, 2013)
 Drawing from 1999
 Paul Dayton
 Jane Lubchenco
 Bruce Menge
 Steve Palumbi

The New York Times, 2012

sfbbo.org

Mills, L. Scott, Michael E. Soule, and Daniel F. Doak. "The keystone-species concept in ecology and conservation." BioScience 43.4 (1993): 219-224.
Levin, Simon A., and Robert T. Paine. "Disturbance, patch formation, and community structure." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 71.7 (1974): 2744-2747.
Paine, Robert T. "Food web complexity and species diversity." American Naturalist (1966): 65-75.
Paine, Robert T. "A note on trophic complexity and community stability." The American Naturalist 103.929
(1969): 91-93.
Paine, Robert T. "Food webs: linkage, interaction strength and community infrastructure." Journal of
Animal Ecology 49.3 (1980): 667-685.
Paine, Robert T. "A conversation on refining the concept of keystone species."Conservation Biology 9.4 (1995): 962-
964.
Paine, Robert T., et al. "Trouble on oiled waters: lessons from the Exxon Valdez oil spill." Annual Review
of Ecology and Systematics (1996): 197-235.
Power, Mary E., et al. "Challenges in the quest for keystones." BioScience46.8 (1996): 609-620.