The Role of Ethology in Oceanography 



H. O. BULL 



Dove Marine Laboratory, Cidlercoats, North Shields, Northumberland, England 



SOME hold that biology has no place in the science of ocea- 

 nography; and it may be recalled that in the early stages of the 

 negotiations leading to the formation of the British National 

 Institute of Oceanography the first draft list of its personnel 

 included, among many oceanographers, only one biologist. He was 

 to act as liaison officer and was to be given a comparatively junior 

 standing. 



Once biology is admitted into oceanography the whole range of 

 organismic activity has to be let in for consideration. The situation 

 is like that of a large, ungainly, infant cuckoo in the nest of 

 another and smaller kind of bird with differing and more tidy 

 habits. Yet, although biology is likely to make great demands on 

 oceanography, it has also big things to offier as is quite clear from 

 the nature of the seminars and of other biological lectures at this 

 Congress. Among these offerings are ethological findings. 



The term "ethology" in the title of this lecture was not chosen 

 lightly. There must surely be something a little odd about a subject 

 upon which the leading encyclopaedias (even in their latest 

 editions) are silent; about which the principal dictionaries are ill- 

 informed; which, as a subject, does not appear in Biological 

 Abstracts, Psychological Abstracts, the International Abstracts of 

 Biological Sciefices, or the Catalogue of the International Library of 

 Medicine. Yet the subject is hotly debated, arouses strong en- 

 thusiasms in its followers and neglect and contumely from others, 

 and has an international journal of comparative ethology called 

 Behaviour. This unsatisfactory situation arises partly from etymo- 

 logical confusion with ecology and partly through the misguided 

 labeling of one particular school of the study of animal behavior 

 as ethology. 



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