Fifty Years After the "Homage to Santa Rosalia": Old and New Paradigms on Biodiversity in Aquatic Ecosystems

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-VI

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2. Foreword

   • Luigi Naselli-Flores, Giampaolo Rossetti

   Pages 1-5

3. The influence of “Homage to Santa Rosalia” on aquatic ecology: a scientometric approach

   • Sidinei Magela Thomaz, Thaisa Sala Michelan, Priscilla Carvalho, Luis Mauricio Bini

   Pages 7-13

4. Linking traits to species diversity and community structure in phytoplankton

   • Elena Litchman, Paula de Tezanos Pinto, Christopher A. Klausmeier, Mridul K. Thomas, Kohei Yoshiyama

   Pages 15-28

5. Drivers of phytoplankton diversity in Lake Tanganyika

   • Jean-Pierre Descy, Anne-Laure Tarbe, Stéphane Stenuite, Samuel Pirlot, Johan Stimart, Julie Vanderheyden et al.

   Pages 29-44

6. Rarity, ecological memory, rate of floral change in phytoplankton—and the mystery of the Red Cock

   • Judit Padisák, Éva Hajnal, Lothar Krienitz, József Lakner, Viktória Üveges

   Pages 45-64

7. Diversity and community biomass depend on dispersal and disturbance in microalgal communities

   • Birte Matthiessen, Robert Ptacnik, Helmut Hillebrand

   Pages 65-78

8. Influence of nutrients, submerged macrophytes and zooplankton grazing on phytoplankton biomass and diversity along a latitudinal gradient in Europe

   • Koenraad Muylaert, Carmen Pérez-Martínez, Pedro Sánchez-Castillo, Torben L. Lauridsen, Maarten Vanderstukken, Steven A. J. Declerck et al.

   Pages 79-90

9. Why are there so many kinds of planktonic consumers? The answer lies in the allometric diet breadth

   • Carmen Rojo, Guillem Salazar

   Pages 91-102

10. Absence of predation eliminates coexistence: experience from the fish–zooplankton interface

    • Z. Maciej Gliwicz, Wayne A. Wursbaugh, Ewa Szymanska

    Pages 103-117

11. On non-Eltonian methods of hunting Cladocera, or impacts of the introduction of planktivorous fish on zooplankton composition and clear-water phase occurrence in a Mediterranean reservoir

    • Jaime Ordóñez, Joan Armengol, Enrique Moreno-Ostos, Luciano Caputo, Juan Carlos García, Rafael Marcé

    Pages 119-129

12. Out of Alaska: morphological diversity within the genus Eurytemora from its ancestral Alaskan range (Crustacea, Copepoda)

    • Stanley I. Dodson, Daniel A. Skelly, Carol Eunmi Lee

    Pages 131-148

13. Does lake age affect zooplankton diversity in Mediterranean lakes and reservoirs? A case study from southern Italy

    • Giuseppe Alfonso, Genuario Belmonte, Federico Marrone, Luigi Naselli-Flores

    Pages 149-164

14. Homage to Hutchinson: does inter-annual climate variability affect zooplankton density and diversity?

    • Nicholas D. Preston, James A. Rusak

    Pages 165-177

15. Homage to the Virgin of Ecology, or why an aquatic insect unadapted to desiccation may maintain populations in very small, temporary Mediterranean streams

    • Cesc Múrria, Núria Bonada, Carles Ribera, Narcís Prat

    Pages 179-190

16. Winning the biodiversity arms race among freshwater gastropods: competition and coexistence through shell variability and predator avoidance

    • Alan P. Covich

    Pages 191-215

17. Stygobiotic crustacean species richness: a question of numbers, a matter of scale

    • Fabio Stoch, Diana M. P. Galassi

    Pages 217-234

18. Santa Rosalia, the icon of biodiversity

    • Luigi Naselli-Flores, Giampaolo Rossetti

    Pages 235-243

This book celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of publication of one of the landmarks of the modern ecological thought: the “Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kinds of animals” by George Evelyn Hutchinson. Published in 1959 in the journal “The American Naturalist”, this article has been the engine which have moved most of the ecological research on biodiversity in the last half a century. Hutchinson starts his article by telling the legend of Santa Rosalia, a hermit who died in the second half of the XIII century and who spent the last years of her life in a cave nearby a pond. In this pond Hutchinson collected two species of aquatic insects and took the inspiration to explore the reasons why life is present on our Planet in such amazing variety of forms. This article thus inaugurated the season of research on biodiversity. Researchers and students in the field of ecology are the readers to whom this book is mainly addressed but also those involved in the history of Science will find in this book useful information. Issued in 2010, which has been declared “international Year of Biodiversity” by the United Nations, this book is also a tribute to the biological diversity allowing, enriching and sustaining human life.

• Biodiversity
• Ecology
• Species richness
• ecosystem
• ecosystems
• macrophytes
• phytoplankton
• plankton
• species diversity
• submerged macrophytes
• zooplankton

From the reviews:

“The articles comprise a wide range of approaches from reviews to the results of specific studies which deal with biodiversity and its ecological function. … They provide a perfect paper for the hasty reader which offers a general access to the topics of the book and makes it easy to identify specific articles for further reading. … I would like to wish the book a broad audience also within the non-ecological community.” (Dieter Leßmann, Basic and Applied Ecology, Vol. 13, 2012)

• Department of Botanical Sciences, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

  Luigi Naselli-Flores

• Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

  Giampaolo Rossetti

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