Charles Sutherland Elton

Charles Sutherland Elton (29 March 1900 – 1 May 1991) was an English zoologist and animal ecologist. He is associated with the development of population and community ecology, including studies of invasive organisms. Personal life Charles Sutherland Elton was born in Manchester, a son of the literary scholar Oliver Elton and the children's writer Letitia Maynard Elton (née MacColl). He had an older brother, Geoffrey Elton, who died at 33, and to whom Charles Elton in many of his writings attributes his interest in scientific natural history. Charles Elton married the English poet Edith Joy Scovell in 1937, a first five-year marriage to Rose Montague having ended in amicable divorce. Charles and Joy had two children, Catherine Ingrid Buffonge MBE and Robert Elton. Professional life Charles Elton was educated at Liverpool College and Oxford University, from which he graduated in zoology in 1922, with a first in his field research project and a third in the exams, and where he subsequently had his entire academic career. During his studies at Oxford he conceptualized his ideas about animal ecology, aiming was to turn natural history into the science of ecology by applying scientific methods to studying the lives of animals in their natural habitats and interactions with the environment. In 1921, while still an undergraduate, Elton assisted Julian Huxley on an expedition to Spitsbergen, where he made an ecological survey of Arctic vertebrates. This he continued on three more Arctic expeditions in 1923, 1924 and 1930. He also spent some time on fieldwork in St. Kilda, Scotland. His Arctic experience led to a consultancy with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1926–1931, to study fluctuating populations of animal species of interest to the fur trade. He later made similar studies of British mouse and vole populations. He spent many years on field research in Wytham Woods, Oxford.