The Symbiont is a 184 page study guide to Ecology 318. It contains pertinent course information and a plan of study for learning ecology in 1 semester. It is organized around 19 topics. Each of these topics is a basic principle of ecology; the topics and the organization are derived from the textbook for the course. In 1995 the textbook is Robert E. Ricklef's The Economy of Nature, 3rd edition. It is published by W.H. Freeman and Company. While I am in general very happy with the text; I have become used to another set of mathematical notations for use in population modelling. I have developed a fairly complicated set of computer programs to help the students learn about modelling population dynamics, and rather than have them confused by two sets of notation I have substituted my own text for a reading of Ricklef's in those cases. In other places, I have told the students not to read a section in order to "fit" the class into one section. My apologies to Dr. Ricklef's for the sometimes blunt way I advise the students to bypass sections where I either disagree with his treatment or where my own ignorance prevents me from understanding it fully myself. I would recommend the Ricklef's text strongly to anyone teaching undergraduate ecology.
This on-line version of the Symbiont has been assembled with some haste. Please be aware that the printed version has a number of graphics which I have prepared; unfortunately I do not have the time to take the embedded graphics and convert them to .GIF files to include. Maybe at some later date I will be able to add them. Also, many of the text-formatting conventions (superscript, subscript, etc.) are not supported by the HTML editor I am using. Finally, the mathmatical equations simply will not convert over at this time. I hope what remains will give the user who does not have the printed version available a feel for the printed document.
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