© 1981 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Interspecific Competition and Species' Distributions: The Ghosts of Theories and Data Past1
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland 21218
The idea that biological interactions between species restrict their distributions beyond limits set by the inorganic environment was established by plant ecologists well before the work of Volterra, Gause, and the development of modern niche theory. Mechanisms of competition between plant species, and the influence of predation and environmental factors on the outcome of interspecific competition, were demonstrated by extensive field experiments. These early botanical achievements were ignored by zoologists whose subsequent, independently derived ideas about competition paralleled those of plant ecologists to a remarkable degree. Application of niche theory to the real world was closely tied to the advent of the "modern synthesis." The primary innovation of niche theory was not simply a new appreciation of the possible importance of competition between animals, but the incorporation of an evolutionary perspective to distributional problems largely absent among ecologists since Darwin.