by Anna Dvorak*

In his lecture “Laws of nature, historical contingency, and the wolves and moose of Isle Royale,” Dr. John A. Vucetich seeks to explain a new approach to the study of ecology that he uses with the Isle Royale Wolf-Moose Project, which is the largest, continuously running predator/prey study in the world.  In his study of population dynamics on the island, he believes that unlike other scientific fields, like chemistry or physics, ecology is not strictly law-based.  Instead it is better studied like other historical events.  He refers to this as historical contingency and he defines his process in two parts.  This process explains population dynamics through a series of disparate random events, each of which has a legacy that has effects comparable in length to the waiting time in between these events.  Each candidate event is crucial to understanding the predator/prey relationship on Isle Royale and more specifically the predation rate of the moose.  Such candidate events in his analysis include novel disease, catastrophic winter, genetic rescue by introducing new wolves to the island, and the end of positive effects from the genetic rescue.  Periods in between these candidate events are characterized as either top-down or bottom-up.  It is these individual events that can be quantifiably explained and then compared to the laws of nature. Continue reading →