The Terminological Jungle Revisited: Making a Case for Use of the Term Resorption

Abstract

In 1953, Robert Whittaker published a paper outlining the confusion caused by the use and misuse of terms relating to the Clementsian notion of climax formations. He termed this state of affairs a jungle. In 1985, a major ecological/physiological process remains entangled in a terminological jungle of its own. This process has had no fewer than sixteen labels given to it, but I will argue that only one word is needed to describe this process, and that word is resorption. The process to which I refer is the mobilization and removal of inorganic and/or organic substances from senescing plant tissues and the subsequent transportation of these substances to surviving tissues. Unlike the controversy and disagreement surrounding the debate over Clementsian terms and their conceptual implications, there is no disagreement among scientists as to what the process of resorption actually is. The problem arises when the process is described by name. Then, there is no agreement on what the process should be called. Even this confusion might be insignificant if it were not for the fact that scientists in the field of biogeochemistry are precisely those who are using the varied names for resorption. To document the size and diversity of this jungle, I have listed the words below that are most commonly used to name the resorption process: backflux (Luxmoore et al. 1981), backmigration (Fries 1952), emigration (Combes 1926), migration (Combes 1926), reabsorption (Small 1972), recovery (Shaver and Melillo 1984), redistribution (Ruess and McNaughton 1984), resorption (Killingbeck 1984), retraction (Whittaker et al. 1979), retranslocation (Chapin 1980), and withdrawal (Stachurski and Zimka 1975). Additionally, there are a host of phrases used commonly to name the resorption process: autumnal migration (Murneek and Logan 1932), back translocation (Mitchell 1936), carry-over of nutrients from the preceding season (Taylor 1967), outflow of mineral substances from leaves in the pre-defoliation period (Smirnov and Semenova 1972), and translocation to the stem (Gosz et al. 1975). A jungle indeed. My support for the term resorption resulted from an exercise in which I eliminated expressions from the above list that did not meet one or more of the four criteria I established for the selection of an appropriate term. These criteria were that the term must be unambiguous, descriptive, as simple and short as possible, and frequently used to describe the process in question. Terms such as migration and withdrawal were eliminated from my list of potential choices because of their multiple meanings and ambiguity. The low descriptive quality of terms such as recovery and redistribution warranted their elimination, while the criterion of simplicity ruled out all of the cumbersome multi-word phrases. The list was thus narrowed to the following three terms, all of which have been used frequently in the resorption literature; reabsorption (Miller 1938, Small 1972), resorption (Insley et al. 1981, Killingbeck 1985, Ryan and Bormann 1982) and retranslocation (Bormann et al. 1977, Jordan and Herrera 1981, Ostman and Weaver 1982). Although any one of these three terms could be used effectively as a descriptor of the process in question, the term resorption turns out to be much less ambiguous than reabsorption or retranslocation. The reason that the latter two terms were not eliminated in my initial screening is that the root words (ie: absorption and translocation), rather than the entire words, are the source of much of the ambiguity. Translocation is so commonly used to describe any transportation of substances within a plant, regardless of direction or source, that simply adding the prefix re adds little specificity to its general meaning. Likewise, the term absorption is routinely associated with several plant processes other than the one in question. In essence then, the common usage and multiple meanings of the root words of reabsorption and retranslocation make the entire words candidates for exclusion under the ambiguity criterion applied above. The term resorption (from the Latin word resorbere, meaning to suck back) remains as the only descriptor from the original list that meets the established criteria: 1) it is unambiguous because it (or its root word) is not used frequently to describe other plant processes, 2) it is descriptive in that it is defined as the act of absorbing again, 3) it is short and simple, and 4) it has appeared frequently in the literature. In further support of this term, it has been pointed out to me (D. F Ryan, pers. comm.) that the medical profession commonly uses the word resorption to describe a zoological process that is in many ways analogous to the plant process (the lysis and assimilation of a substance, as of bone; Miller and Keane 1978). I considered concluding this discourse with a justification for the standardized use of a single word to describe the resorption process, but I think that is unnecessary. There is simply no advantage to maintaining