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Inside the Blue Book
A Course for the Amphibious
November 1999
by Bruce Fellman
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 370
Aquatic Ecology
Faculty: David Skelly, Assistant Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies
The syllabus for EEB 370 begins with a warning to armchair ecologists. “Be prepared to get into the water,” it reads. “It may rain or even snow on the days of our scheduled field trips. We will still go.”
Students, who are often upper-level undergraduates, definitely get their feet wet in the course of this intensive lab and lecture examination of freshwater ecosystems. First, they journey to Branford to explore the biology, chemistry, and physics of Linsley Pond and later, they wade into a pair of streams in the Pisgah Brook watershed.
“We start by looking at how lakes work,” says David Skelly, an aquatic ecologist who has conducted extensive studies on tadpole biology, “and for our purposes, we couldn’t ask for a better place than Linsley.”
The late G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a Sterling Professor of Biology, and his colleagues spent half a century, beginning in the mid-1930s, examining this body of water. Their notes, and even their preserved specimens, are still available so students can compare their own findings with those of the founders of the academic discipline known as freshwater ecology. “There’s a great historical legacy of data, so we can see how events in the past might influence current patterns in nature,” says Skelly.
The impact of people is particularly evident when the class undertakes its assessment of two streams, one heavily developed, the other largely untouched. “You can see the impact of development in every aspect of the stream, from the kinds of insects that live there to the hydrology,” says Skelly, adding that the course features a guest appearance by F. Herbert Bormann, the Oastler Professor Emeritus of Forest Ecology, and one of the cofounders of the landmark Hubbard Brook ecosystem study.
“Father Watershed,” as Bormann is often called, will reiterate a major point in EEB 370: the interaction of politics and ecology. “Most of the students go on to careers in policy and planning,” says Skelly. “By learning natural science, they can see why it’s cheaper to do things right in the first place than to put on Band-Aids later on.”  |
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