Bulletin

Issue: November/December 2007

News

Island colonisation Biology sheds light on the real wealth of nations

Professor New in front of a portrait of Ian Thornton

STUDIES INTO how plants and animals colonise and establish communities on new or sterilised islands – for example those formed by volcanic activity – are yielding significant insights for those times ahead when we will have to repair large tracts of damaged or devastated ecosystems.

Such islands are natural laboratories for biologists and La Trobe University,
through the efforts of its foundation Professor of Zoology, the late Ian Thornton, has been a leader in this type of research since the early 1980s.

In a book Island Colonization: The Origin and Development of Island Communities – completed posthumouslyby colleague Professor Tim New, Head ofthe Department of Zoology, and publishedby Cambridge University Press this year– Professor Thornton writes of climatechange. He predicts that in the short termthe bottom lines of national economies willtake precedence over global concerns.

‘Large-scale rapid consumption and destruction of some of the Earth’s non-renewable or slowly renewable resources will continue – and at an accelerating rate.’

However, he says eventually ‘more and more countries will come to regard their plant and animal species, and the ecosystems that they help to form, as part of their nation’s and the world’s natural wealth. Crucial to any attempts to restore, or recreate a natural ecosystem will be some knowledge of its “embryology”, how it has arisen and developed naturally.’

Ian Thornton’s enthusiasm for science, field work and sense of adventure inspired generations of students.

For more than a decade he led a high-profile research program into all aspects of the re-assembly of a tropical forest ecosystem on the Indonesian Krakatau archipelago, which was devastated by volcanic eruption in 1883. Highly regarded by the international biogeographic community, this work involved seven major expeditions and more than 60 scientists from 20 institutions in eight countries. Professor New accompanied Professor Thornton on four expeditions to Krakatau as a specialist on insects and other invertebrates.

Professor Thornton led his last international expedition of nine scientists to a remote volcano north of New Guinea in 1999 when he was aged 73. He died in 2002. A mongst the papers he left behind was his incomplete manuscript on island colonisation, the last of many words he wrote on this subject. And an express wish that Professor New should finish the book.

As well as a range of books going back to Darwin’s Islands (1971), a classic on the Galapagos, and publications in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Professor Thornton’s Krakatau work has been incorporated into teaching programs in biogeography at overseas universities and in an Australian biology text for secondary schools.