THE EMERGENCE OF MANIPULATIVE EXPERIMENTS IN ECOLOGICAL SPIDER RESEARCH (1684–1973)

Abstract

Abstract The history of spider ecology is discussed from its early beginnings in 1684 when the natural historian Martin Lister published his observations, to the post-war period up until 1973 when ecological spider research gathered momentum. While there have been many important observations since Lister, spider ecology appeared explicitly in the titles of papers only after the turn of the 20th century. However, much of what was published up until the 1950s is of little scientific value because these works contained natural history notes and conjecture, not manipulative experimentation. The exception was a paper written in 1939 by Pontus Palmgren who was not an ecologist but paradoxically a functional anatomist with a particular interest in ornithology. His paper was in the spirit of Ernst Haeckel's original definition of ecology that was seen as synonymous with physiology, a legacy that was detected in many of the papers decades after Palmgren. However, there was little evidence that ecological theory wa...