Reseña biográfica

Born in 1844 in Silver Creek, Illinois, Forbes was raised on a farm with five
siblings. At age 17, he joined the Union cavalry and served four years during
the Civil War, including four months as a prisoner of war. After the war, he
studied medicine, but within three years he turned to natural history. He
attended Illinois State Normal University for a brief time but continued natural
history studies on his own.
In 1872, Forbes became curator of the Museum of the State Natural History
Society in Normal, Illinois; in 1877, he transformed this institution into the
Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History. In 1884, he moved with the
laboratory and museum to Urbana, became a professor at the University of
Illinois, and completed a Ph.D. from Indiana University. He was chief of the
Illinois State Natural History Survey until his death in 1930.

His publications are striking for their merger of extensive field observations
with conceptual insights. While already famous as an economic
entomologist, Forbes undertook studies of massive fish mortality in Lake
Mendota, Wisconsin. He showed the connection of algae blooms and lake
physics to fish kills, and embarked on a remarkable research program into the
ecology of lakes and rivers.
"Very early in his program, he became impressed with the
significance of interrelationships between organisms and their
environment. Before ecology had been conceived as an offspring
of the biological sciences, Professor Forbes had adopted the
ecological point of view in his published writings. As early as
1887, in a spirit of prophetic anticipation of the coming ecological
era in North America, he delivered a paper on The Lake as a
Microcosm, wherein he set forth the themes of interdependence
of organisms and community of interests in aggregations of living
beings. This ecological point of view has dominated his entire
program of research. His contributions on insects, as well as
those on fishes and on birds have been conceived in light of
relationship to the environment and have always acknowledged man
and human interests as essential though by no means exclusive
factors of importance in the environment of organisms. As a
consequence, even his economic studies have been engendered in
that breadth of biological interpretation that renders them
distinctive in their field. Address at University of Illinois on March 15, 1930, by Dr. H. J. Van Cleave.
When we watch a summer thunder storm, which covers
the earth with a sudden flood and makes rivulets by the
road-side, each carrying down to the smaller streams its
load of leaves and other organic debris, together with
the lighter parts of the soil, and when we see these silt
laden streams unite in rivers turbid with the rich spoil of
the land, we are inclined to lament the enormous and
oft-repeated waste, seeing no way in which it can be
recovered in any considerable measure to the use
of man ; but if we follow it to the lake bottom and the
river bed we shall see much of it arrested there, to
become an aquatic soil, partly muddy water and partly
wet mud, more fertile even than the richest fields, and
sustaining a new population of plants and animals, of
many grades and classes, one climbing upward, as we
may say, upon the shoulders of another, to reach a level
which makes them accessible again to our use.
Tres miradas sobre la compleja interacción de los organismos vivos
1. William Shakespeare El sueño de una noche de verano
I know a bank where the wild thyme
blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet
grows ; Quite over-canopied with luscious
woodbine With sweet muskroses, and with
eglantine There sleeps Titania sometime of the
night, Lull'd in these flowers with dances and
delight; And there the snake throws her
enamell'd skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a
fairy in. ?

A Midsummer's Dream (Shakespeare)

Hay una loma en que florece el tomillo,
brotan las violetas y los ciclaminos,
pergolada de fragante madreselva,
de rosales trepadores y mosquetas.
Parte de la noche duerme allí Titania,
arrullada entre las flores tras la danza;
su piel esmaltada deja allí la sierpe,
ropaje que a un hada de sobras envuelve.
 2.Párrafos finales de “El Origen de las especies”. Charles Darwin
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many
kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with
worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately
constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other
in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduc tion;
Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect
and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of
Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural
Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved
forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted
object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher
animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into
one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms

Charles Darwin
 3. E. Forbes. El Lago como un microcosmos
Have these facts and ideas, derived from a study of our aquatic microcosm, any general
application on a higher plane? We have here an example of the triumphant beneficence of
the laws of life applied to conditions seemingly the most unfavorable possible for any
mutually helpful adjustment. In this lake, where competitions are fierce and continuous
beyond any parallel in the worst periods of human history; where they take hold, not on
goods of life merely, but always upon life itself; where mercy and charity and sympathy and
magnanimity and all the virtues are utterly unknown; where robbery and murder and the
deadly tyranny of strength over weakness are the unvarying rule; where what we call wrong-
doing is always triumphant, and what we call goodness would be immediately fatal to its
possessor? even here, out of these hard conditions, an order has been evolved which is the
best conceivable without a total change in the conditions themselves; an equilibrium has
been reached and is steadily maintained that actually accomplishes for all the parties
involved the greatest good which the circumstances will at all permit. In a system where life
is the universal good, but the destruction of life the well-nigh universal occupation, an order
has spontaneously arisen which constantly tends to maintain life at the highest limit? a limit
far higher, in fact, with respect to both quality and quantity, than would be possible in the
absence of this destructive conflict. Is there not, in this reflection, solid ground for a belief in
the final beneficence of the laws of organic nature? If the system of life is such that a
harmonious balance of conflicting interests has been reached where every element is either
hostile or indifferent to every other, may we not trust much to the outcome where, as in
human affairs, the spontaneous adjustments of nature are aided by intelligent effort, by
sympathy, and by self-sacrifice? ( Forbes.)
The lakes of Illinois are of two kinds, fluviatile
and water-shed.

¿Cuales son las diferencias básicas entre ambos?

One finds in a single body of water a far more complete
and independent equilibrium of organic life and activity
than on any equal body of land. It is an islet of older, lower
life in the midst of the higher more recent life of the
surrounding region. It forms a little world within itself,--a
microcosm within which all the elemental forces are at
work and the play of life goes on in full, but on so small a
scale as to bring it easily within the mental grasp.
whatever affects any species belonging to it, must
speedily have its influence of some sort upon the whole
assemblage. He will thus be made to
see the impossibility of studying any form completely, out
of relation to the other forms,--the
necessity for taking a comprehensive survey of the whole
as a condition to a satisfactory
understanding of any part.
 Thienemann in 1926
first used the
concepts of
producers,
consumers, and
reducers to organize
his biological data,
and included a
diagram that would
influence Raymond L.
Lindeman in his
epochal
“Trophic–Dynamic
Aspect of Ecology”
(1942) that cited this
(1926) and two other
Thienemann papers

Food web in a lake. Thienemann

1925:57. [Egerton 2007:60.]
August Thienemann (1882–1960) “only knowledge of the primordial,
tropical conditions can give the
scientist a deeper understanding of
how life proceeds at our latitudes”
Perhaps Thienemann never saw the Illinois journal
containing Stephen Forbes’ “The lake as a microcosm”
(Forbes 1887, reprinted 1925), yet Thienemann used the
same word, “microcosm” to describe life in a lake, and he
used the superorganism metaphor to describe interacting
species. His lake researches led to three important
generalizations, the first two from the 1920s:

1. The more variable the biotope (environmental) conditions, the greater the
number of species in the biocenosis (biotic community);

2. The more biotope conditions deviate from optimal for most species, the
smaller the number of species, but the greater the number of individuals of
species represented;

3. The longer a locality retains the same conditions, the richer and more stable is
its biocenosis.
 Seasonal Food-Cycle
Dynamics in a Senescent
Lake* Raymond L. Lindeman
1941

Lindeman, R. L. 1942.
The trophic–dynamic
aspect of ecology.
Ecology 23:399–418.

"Large fish eats small fish ;

Small fish eats water insects ;
Water insects eat plants and
mud.”
Chinese proverb
 Lagos Fluviales
The amount and variety of animal life contained in them as well
as in the streams related to them, is extremely variable,
depending chiefly on the frequency, extent, and duration of the
overflows. This is, in fact, the characteristic and peculiar feature
of life in these waters. There is perhaps no better illustration of
the methods by which the flexible system of organic life adapts
itself, without injury, to widely and rapidly fluctuating conditions.
Whenever the waters of the river remain for a long time far
beyond their banks, the breeding grounds of fishes and other
animals are immensely extended, and their food supplies
increased to a corresponding degree.
The survey conducted detailed research on these lakes beginning in 1894. Most of the lakes in this map were drained for agriculture by the
mid 1920s. Showing a continued reliance on local knowledge, this map, drafted for a 1965 survey bulletin, was reported as "checked by
William Riley and Frank Rudolph, commercial fishermen residing in Havana; both had fished in the various lakes shown on the map." From
William C. Starrett and Arold W. Fritz, "A Biological Investigation of the Fishes of Lake Chautauqua, Illinois," Illinois Natural History Survey
Bulletin, 1965, 29(1):14. The inset map, showing the location of the area in Illinois, is not in the original.
"Seining in the Illinois River, Beardstown, III." This view is from a postcard mailed in 1909.
Most seining took place not in the river itself, as depicted here, but in the backwater lakes. Prior to
working for the Natural History Survey, Miles Newberry, Henry Allen, and other locals had worked on
seine crews like this one.
Figure 4. "Bottom-landsat High Water."E cologistC harlesK ofoidi s in the bow, withf ishermanM iles Newberry in the stern. Newberry was a local
fisherman and hunter hired as a field assistant by the survey. This 1895 photographa ppears staged to show the scientist as "local."C omparet his
scene withS tephen Forbes's vignetted escribingl ife on the IllinoisR iver:" Ab oatj uts out below-as primitive a boat as any on the Nile in the time
of the Pharaohs,-and in it a man and two boys-also as primitivea s Moses' Hebrewsi n the wilderness-they are crossing the stream fromt he littlet
own behind us to the opposite bottoml ands where they have theirh ome in a temporaryh ut among the trees. One of them, standing in the bow,
paddles the boat with a single oar, first on this side and then on that,a nothers tands in the middle."( S. A. Forbes, "Midsummerat the BiologicalR
esearch Station," n.d., FolderI I.A.4,F orbes Collection.)P hoto courtesy of the IllinoisN aturalH istoryS urvey
Two ideas are thus seen to be sufficient to explain the order evolved
from this seeming chaos;

the first that of a general community of interests among all classes

of organic beings,

and the second that of the beneficent power of natural selection

which compels such adjustments of the rates of destruction and of
multiplication of the various species as shall best promote this
common interest.
Sus memorias sobre vivir la guerra

"In one respect particularly, our experience was a hopeful

prophecy, if not itself a cause, of subsequent success. Any one
who had kept the solitary flame of his separate intellectual life
steadily burning through all the blasts and storms of war, might
reasonably believe that nothing that should happen to him thereafter
could possibly extinguish it; and this, as we all know, is
more than can be inferred from the completion of an ordinary
college course. The eager hunger with which the students
among us attacked the full tables at home, after four years or
more of semi-starvation on a few husks and scraps, and the
enthusiastic appreciation with which we embraced such long deferred
opportunities as still remained to us, made it certain that
no artificial graduation-day would put an end to our studies, and
this, after all, is the best outcome of an education. Those of us
who survived the Civil War in good health and strength, with
morals unstained and minds still alert, have had no final cause to
regret what seemed at the time the complete wreckage of our
plans of life. To us war was not hell, but at the worst a kind
of purgatory, from whose flames we emerged with much of the
dross burned out of our characters, and with a fair chance still
left to each of us to win his proper place in the life of the world."
Bibliografía Básica

Local Knowledge, Environmental Politics, and

the Founding of Ecology in the United States:
Stephen Forbes and "The Lake as a
Microcosm" (1887) Author(s): Daniel W.
Schneider Source: Isis, Vol. 91, No. 4, (Dec.,
2000), pp. 681-705

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 50:

Formalizing Limnology, 1870s to 1920s
Frank N. Egerton
Department of History, University of
Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha, Wisconsin 53141