The Dance of Hare and Lynx at the Top of the Food Web

Abstract

In 1921, Charles Sutherland Elton, then an undergraduate at Oxford, joined the first of three expeditions to study the ecology of Spitsbergen Island, north of Norway. On these expeditions, Elton was a field assistant to Sir Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley. Sir Julian was one of a small group of naturalists, ecologists, statisticians, and mathematicians who, in the 1920s and 1930s, unified Darwin’s ideas of natural selection with Mendel’s laws of genetics. This unification became the modern theory of evolution largely accepted by the scientific community today. While in Spitsbergen and also on a later expedition to Lapland, Elton noticed the wide fluctuations and overland dispersals of populations of lemmings. In his field diary one night, he wrote that he “lay out on a river bank and watched lemmings swim across one by one in the faint darkness of the Northern summer.” Much of Elton’s later research began with simple natural history observations such as this; in fact, Elton’s career goal was to develop the new science of ecology as “scientific natural history.”

The large population cycles between lynx and snowshoe hare are iconic symbols of the North Woods and its cousin the Boreal Forest, but their causes remain obscure.