Dissertation Research: The Field Naturalist Tradition and the Emergence of American Animal Ecology

This dissertation research project will focus on the development and transformation of the American tradition of field natural history, particularly field zoology, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the early 1920's. This tradition, originated by the systematic and biogeographical work of Louis Agassiz and Spencer F. Baird, emerged in the context of federal surveys after the early 1850's. It found its institutional support in connection to the U.S. National Museum and several agencies that funded scientific research of relevance to the survey and management of natural resources: the U.S. Fish Commission, the Bureau of the Biological Survey, and several state natural history surveys established in the American Midwest. This study will argue that during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth this tradition of field zoology underwent a transformation as a result of - and in reaction to - institutional developments, epistemological challenges, and utilitarian concerns. Focusing on the interplay between biogeographical interests and utilitarian concerns, and paying attention to the institutional and generational dimensions of that interplay, the research will improve our understanding of several issues that have concerned historians of biology in America. It will balance the emphasis heretofore put by historians on the morphological tradition of post-Darwinian biology and its experimental transformation with attention to the studies of adaptation and geographical distribution during the second half of the nineteenth century. It will also complete our views of the emergence of ecology in America, showing that many animal ecologists did not merely mimic their botanical counterparts, extending experimental methodologies into field study. They borrowed from their own tradition of observational natural history, particularly from the body of information of animals' habits and life histories put together by naturalists interested in the management of natural resources.