G. Evelyn Hutchinson

George Evelyn Hutchinson ( born January 30, 1903 in Cambridge, † 17 May 1991, England ) was an English Limnologist and ecologist.

He lived and worked until shortly before his death in the USA. He is in the English-speaking world as the " father of modern limnology " and also as "the father of ecology".

Hutchinson attended Gresham 's School in Norfolk.

He began his academic career with a study of aquatic insects, but first developed it to a physiologist. With a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1925 he went to Naples in Italy and examined hormone effects on the development of frogs. In the same year he accepted a lectureship in zoology in the Witwatersrand. There he worked on the systematics of Schnabelkerfen, came with anthropological work in Africa in touch and eventually participated in an ecologically oriented study of local lakes and pans. In 1928 he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, where he remained from then on until his death. He studied intensively since that time with the literature on inland waters and on the ecology of animals and with the former ideas about the functional structure of communities of organisms. He saw himself from then on as a limnologists. 1931/32 he took part in the great India Expedition Yale University.

From now on Hutchinson devoted all aspects of water and united the views of the various natural sciences to the consideration of this subject. His work initially focused on the physical and chemical aspects of lakes and then took increasingly biological aspects in, the interrelationships between living organisms and the chemical conditions in the water, and finally aspects of evolutionary ecology. In this context, Hutchinson developed the concept of the ecological niche, which now belongs to the basic concepts of ecology and is also referred to in common parlance.

Hutchinson published in 1950 the work "The Biogeochemistry of Vertebrate Excretion ," which deals with guano and the biogeochemical cycling of phosphorus. To date, this is the most comprehensive and most cited work on guano.

Hutchinson created from 1957 a comprehensive textbook of Limnology, the " Treatise on Limnology ", whose last band still appeared posthumously in 1993. In its sequence of topics, the scientific way the author depicts.

In Hutchinson, a rich pedigree is known ecologists and limnologists back world, the doctorate with him or one of his pupils. His immediate disciples include W.T. Edmondson, Raymond Laurel Lindeman, Edward Smith Deevey, J. Shapiro, EA McLaren ( with his pupil Heinz Löffler in Vienna), Howard T. Odum, Lawrence B. Slobodkin, JR Vallentyne, F.E. Smith and P.H. Klopfer, J. L. Brooks ( with his student Jürgen Jacobs in Munich), to name only the best known.

Writings

  • Survey of the contemporary knowledge of biogeochemistry: 3 The Biogeochemistry of vertebrate excretion. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. Bull, 96, 1950, 554 pages
  • A treatise on limnology. Wiley, New York.
  • Homage to Santa Rosalia, or why are there so many kinds of animals? In: American Naturalist. Vol 93, 1959, pp. 245-249.
  • The paradox of the plankton. In: American Naturalist. Vol 95, 1961, pp. 137-145.
  • The Kindly Fruits of the Earth: Recollections of an Embryo Ecologist. Yale University Press, New Haven 1979, ISBN 0-300-02272-7.

Awards

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