The instability of field experiments: building an experimental research tradition on the rocky seashores (1950-1985)

The Bay of Porto Paone: the first "tiny underwater nature reserve" in the Gulf of Naples (1960-1966)

From 1960 to 1966, the Bay of Porto Paone, a volcanic crater located on the islet of Nisida, was home to the first "tiny underwater nature reserve" of the Gulf of Naples. The concession of the stretch of water was requested by the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli (in 1982 renamed Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn), a marine biological institution traditionally devoted to laboratory studies of fundamental biological phenomena, which at the time aimed at strengthening its international visibility as a place for field ecological research. The first part of the paper contextualizes this local event in the broader international trend towards the development of ecological sciences and the rising call for field sites as essential infrastructures for ecological research. The second part reconstructs the legal, administrative and scientific practices that made it possible the establishment of an "underwater reserve" in the Bay of Porto Paone and describes the main research projects carried out there. The last part of the paper goes one step beyond historiography and addresses issues related to the importance of historical narratives on past place-based research projects for contemporary studies in historical ecology.

Landscapes of Time: Building Long-Term Perspectives in Animal Behavior

In the 1960s, scientists fascinated by the behavior of free-living animals founded research projects that expanded into multi-generation investigations. This paper charts the history of three scientists' projects to uncover the varied reasons for investing in a "long-term" perspective when studying animal behavior: Kenneth Armitage's study of marmots in the Rocky Mountains, Jeanne Altmann's analysis of baboons in Kenya, and Timothy Hugh Clutton-Brock's studies (among others) of red deer on the island of Rhum and meerkats in the Kalahari. The desire to study the behavior of the same group of animals over extended periods of time, I argue, came from different methodological traditions - population biology, primatology, and sociobiology - even as each saw themselves as contributing to the legacy of ethology. As scientists embraced and combined these approaches, a small number of long-running behavioral ecology projects like these grew from short pilot projects into decades-long centers of intellectual gravity within behavioral ecology as a discipline. By attending to time as well as place, we can see how this long-term perspective was crucial to their success; they measured evolutionary changes over generations of animals and their data provided insights into how the animals they studied were adapting (or not) to changing local and global environmental factors.

Measuring Daphnia life history in the wild: The efficacy of individual field cages

Life-history studies are often conducted in a laboratory environment where it is easy to assay individual animals. However, factors such as temperature, photoperiod, and nutrition vary greatly between laboratory and field environments, making it difficult to compare results. Consequently, there is a need to study individual life histories in the field, but this is currently difficult in systems such as Daphnia where it is not possible to mark and track individual animals. Here, we present a proof of principle study showing that field cages are a reliable method for collecting individual-level life-history data in Daphnia magna. As a first step, we compared the life history of paired animals reared outside and inside cages to test the hypothesis that cages allow free flow of algal food resources. We then used a seminatural mesocosm setting to compare the performance of individual field cages versus glass jars refilled with mesocosm water each day. We found that cages did not inhibit food flow and that differences in life histories between three clones detected in the jar assays were also detectable using the much less labor-intensive field cages. We conclude that field cages are a feasible approach for collecting individual-level life-history data in systems such as Daphnia where individual animals cannot be marked and tracked.