Vertebrate Ecology in Public Health

Abstract

MY OBJECTIVE IS to indicate the scope and place of vertebrate in modem public health. Ecology is a term which has recently gained vogue; today an ecologist is almost never called upon to explain its meaning. Yet, because of the broad scope of the termencompassing all interrelationships between an organism and its environment-he usually finds it necessary to specify the branch of in which he has specialized. If one accepts the literal definition of ecology, nearly every worker in the biological or medical field can be considered an ecologist, for each is concerned with the relationships of organisms to their environment in one sense or another. A viral geneticist, for example, studies the effects of naturally occurring or purposeful changes in the environment upon the genetic characteristics of viruses. Similar examples can be drawn from practically any biological field, yet the workers in these fields rarely identify themselves a,s ecologists. The term can be applied far from its original intent, such as the ecology of thymus cells, and still be well understood. Actually, most people today think of as the study of an integrated system, the study of living organisms in situ. Traditional evolved from the study of natural history. The application of scientific methods to the already broad field of natural history brought about an inevitable fractionation. No single man can now hope to identify himself as simply an ecologist; he is either a plant ecologist or an animal ecologist. He also has major fields of interest, such as the effects of stress on the population dynamics of vertebrates or the effects of ionizing radiation on the phytoecosystem. In addition, ecological technique,s have become sophisticated. Foir example, lightweight, relatively powerful radio transmitters have been developed for the telemetry of physiological information from free-living wild animals, and the application of radiological techniques has created the whole new field of radiation ecology.