Context
The owner’s coral batch (four readings) had no topic for its subject:
- the holobiont paradigm;
- bleaching as dysbiosis;
- moonlight-cued mass spawning;
- herbivory and reef resilience.
The filing agent had to tag every one natural-sciences plus
complex-systems. That says neither what the works are about nor what
someone browsing for them would look under. Two subjects were missing:
- Community and ecosystem ecology. Hughes et al. is a field experiment on how herbivory governs reef recovery, and its theory is a claim about community interactions.
- Symbiosis. The holobiont and bleaching reviews are about a
partnership between host and microbes.
individuationandphilosophy-of-biologycover only the question of which entity is the individual.
Decision
Add ecology: how organisms interact with each other and with their
environment. That includes:
- symbiosis and host–microbe partnerships;
- herbivory and trophic interactions;
- community structure;
- resilience and regime shifts in ecosystems.
Tags in the batch:
- Hughes et al. and its theory take
ecologyfirst. - The two holobiont reviews and the bleaching theory take it second, after
natural-sciences. - The spawning paper keeps
natural-sciencesfirst, because its subject is timing. It does not takeecology.
Existing documents that are about ecology are retagged as they are next touched. About twenty LITs use ecological vocabulary, and a sweep is a separate piece of work.
Alternatives considered
natural-sciencespluscomplex-systems. That is what the filing agent was forced into. It gives the subject no word.- Separate
symbiosisandcommunity-ecologywords. With four papers, one word for interactions between organisms is enough. Split it when the holdings warrant it. chronobiologyfor the spawning paper. One paper is too few to name a topic. Revisit if more work on biological timing arrives.