A nyone who remembers that King Philip came over from Germany stoned owes a debt of gratitude to 18th-century polymath Carl Linnaeus. That cannabis-sc

Digging Into the First Work of Modern Ecology

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2024-11-15 07:30:04

A nyone who remembers that King Philip came over from Germany stoned owes a debt of gratitude to 18th-century polymath Carl Linnaeus. That cannabis-scented mnemonic device from high school biology class refers, of course, to the taxonomic ranks of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species—the system of classifying the natural world from least to most specific. We are genus homo, species sapiens because of Linnaeus’ Systema naturæ, which, when published in 1735, brought some order to our sprawling family trees—not only for us, but the trees, too, and every living thing in between.

After classifying who belongs where, Linnaeus, in 1749, set out to compose a massive thesis about who eats what. Published in Latin as Pan Svecicus, this wide-ranging botanical study of the Nordic countryside sought to give Swedish farmers hard data on which plants their grazing animals liked to munch on. It was a remarkable doorstop of a work that was far ahead of its time, Håkan Rydin, an emeritus professor of plant ecology at Sweden’s Uppsala University tells me. By examining the interplay between plants, the animals that ate them, and the places they grew, Linnaeus unwittingly conducted the first work of modern ecology.

As one of Linnaeus’ lesser-known works, written originally in dense Latin, Pan Svecicus presented a staggering amount of data that Linnaeus never really got around to analyzing, says Rydin. It describes 2,325 experiments involving 643 different plant species, but largely ignores what useful things the data suggest. So, Rydin and co-authors recently undertook a study of their own, which was published in September, to bring some tidiness to Linnaeus’ little known work.

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