Charles Elton

Charles Elton (born March 29, 1900, Liverpool, Eng.—died May 1, 1991, Oxford, Oxfordshire) was an English biologist credited with framing the basic principles of modern animal ecology.

Early influences

Elton was educated first at Liverpool College and then at New College, Oxford, from which he graduated with first-class honours in zoology in 1922. Like many others, Elton rebelled against the strong emphasis on comparative anatomy in zoology at that time. Although most of his contemporaries turned to the physical and chemical analysis of animal mechanisms in the laboratory, Elton, at heart a naturalist, went in the opposite direction—to use the scientific method to study the lives of animals in their natural habitats and interrelationships with their surroundings. He set out to turn natural history into science—the science of ecology. The naturalists are the pioneer observers preparing the ground for the ecologists, who follow with their more quantitative and experimental studies. When Elton began his work, he described it as “the sociology and economics of animals.”

The great naturalists of the past had a marked influence on Elton’s outlook. He wrote of Alexander von Humboldt as “perhaps the first ecologist” in that he “created a stirring picture of the plant and animal world as a whole, with its majestic settings and its complex interplay of forces.” Moreover, Elton recalled that “Humboldt’s writings in turn inspired Charles Darwin, who went further than most of his generation in grasping the tremendous intricacy and importance of plant and animal interrelationships.” Elton was particularly impressed by the methodology of the American ecologist Victor Ernest Shelford in his book Animal Communities in Temperate America as Illustrated in the Chicago Region (1913). He had an opportunity to apply Shelford’s ideas in 1921, when, still an undergraduate, he acted as assistant to Julian Huxley on the University of Oxford expedition to Spitsbergen; at this time he was given a free hand in making an ecological survey of local animal life. He continued this project on three subsequent expeditions to the Arctic, in 1923, 1924, and 1930. Just as Darwin had been much influenced by the Essay on the Principle of Population of Thomas Malthus, so was Elton influenced by The Population Problem (1922) of Alexander Carr-Saunders, who was also a member of the Oxford expedition to Spitsbergen and who provided Elton with a first-hand introduction to his ideas.

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Faces of Science

(Read Thomas Malthus’s 1824 Britannica essay on population.)

Establishment of ecology

Elton’s first book, Animal Ecology, published in 1927, was a landmark not only for his brilliant treatment of animal communities but also because the main features of his discussion have remained as leading principles of the subject ever since: food chains and the food cycle, the size of food, niches, and the “pyramid of numbers.” He also developed more comprehensive ideas about the factors that govern animal numbers. As a result of his Arctic experience, Elton had become a biological consultant to the Hudson’s Bay Company, a position that allowed him to make his important studies of the fluctuations in the populations of various furbearing mammals revealed in the trappers’ records, which date from 1736. This study in turn led to his research on the fluctuations in Britain’s mouse and vole populations as they were affected by their changing environmental conditions.

In 1930 appeared his provocative book Animal Ecology and Evolution, in which he said that “the balance of nature does not exist and perhaps never has existed.” Moreover, “in periods of stress it is a common thing for animals to change their habitats and usually this change involves migration.” And again, “we are face to face with a process which may be called the selection of the environment by the animal, as opposed to the natural selection of the animal by the environment.” Unfortunately, his increasing concern with population numbers and their fluctuations did not allow him to pursue these exciting evolutionary ideas.

In 1932 Elton established his Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford. It became both a world centre for the collection of data on variations in animal numbers and a research institute in terrestrial ecology. It attracted workers from many countries, providing training for younger individuals who carried the Elton tradition to distant places, such as California and British Columbia in one hemisphere and Australia and New Zealand in the other. In the same year, he became editor of the new Journal of Animal Ecology, which was launched by the British Ecological Society largely under his influence. In 1936 Oxford appointed Elton reader in animal ecology, and Corpus Christi College elected him a senior research fellow.

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Elton’s extensive work on mice and voles enabled him to assign his bureau at the outbreak of World War II the task of finding practical methods of controlling rodent pests, a study that saved his country much loss of food during those critical years. The methods he and his colleagues developed and the results they achieved are described in The Control of Rats and Mice (1954), which has become the model for such work all over the world. In 1942 he published his study on Voles, Mice and Lemmings, and in 1958 he discussed in The Ecology of Invasions of Animals and Plants the effects produced by the spread of organisms introduced into an area by both natural and human agencies. After World War II, Elton was engaged primarily in habitat studies; these studies formed the basis of his important volume The Pattern of Animal Communities (1966). This work gives more general principles, particularly the inverse pyramid of habitats, which corresponds to his pyramid of numbers.

Elton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1953 and foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society in 1967 and the Royal Society’s Darwin Medal in 1970. He retired in 1967.