Models and field evidence
Schoener earned his biology bachelor’s degree at Harvard in 1965 and doctorate in 1969. His work addresses food webs, territory size, foraging and population interactions, alongside methods for estimating home ranges and evaluating the independence of successive observations.
References: [1]
Islands as comparative units
He and collaborators have studied colonization and competition in island lizards and spiders, manipulating food webs to examine responses of producers, herbivores and predators. Separated islands provide replicated comparisons under field conditions.
References: [1]
Tracing a small founding population
After a 2004 hurricane, researchers introduced one randomly selected male and female anole to each of seven islands in 2005, following searches that found no surviving lizards there. They followed these populations, the source island and twelve control islands for four years to examine founding differences and adaptation.
References: [2]
Adaptation with persistent differences
Limb length declined in the finer vegetation of the experimental islands, but populations with longer-limbed founders remained relatively longer-limbed. In this experiment, founder effects persisted while populations adapted, rather than one process immediately eliminating the signal of the other.
References: [2]