RAVENOUS FISH AND TASTY plankton. Rain forests dripping with nameless reptiles, birds gliding under canopies of leaves, insects buzzing like electrons in an accelerator. Frost belts where voles and lemmings flourish and diminish with tidy four-year periodicity in the face of nature’s bloody combat. The world makes a messy laboratory for ecologists, a cauldron of five million interacting species. Or is it fifty million? Ecologists do not actually know. Mathematically inclined biologists of the twentieth century built a discipline, ecology, that stripped away the noise and color of real life and
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