Charles Elton

Charles Elton was born on 29 March 1900 in Manchester, England, and died on 1 May 1991 in Oxford. Educated at New College, Oxford, he graduated with first class honours in zoology in 1922 and in 1932 founded Oxford's Bureau of Animal Population to study fluctuations in wild animal numbers. His 1927 textbook Animal Ecology set out food chains, the food cycle and the pyramid of numbers describing how few individuals occupy the highest feeding levels of a community, and gave the term ecological niche a functional definition, an animal's niche being how it lives and feeds rather than merely where it is found. He is regarded as a founder of modern animal ecology, and his later book on invasive species founded invasion ecology as a subfield.