| Activity | Nicholson receives little more than a quick nod in most elementary ecology or population biology texts, yet on last checking I find that no fewer than three of his papers (he wrote no books) have been cited more than four hundred times in the Science Citation Index, a record very few past scientists in either field can match. On moving to Australia in 1921 the young scientist was faced with the challenge of upgrading instruction in zoology, and particularly entomology, to a standard matching that of Europe and North America; this he succeeded in doing to an extent that he is now sometimes referred to as being the "father" of entomology as a profession in that country. In 1931 he moved over to CSIR, where he began a thirty-year career as the country's top economic entomologist. Meanwhile, Nicholson was finding time to work on interesting theoretical problems. In 1927 he published an innovative look at the theory of mimicry, but it was his 1933 and 1935 analyses on animal population regulation that brought him to general attention. In these, as later backed up by laboratory studies on parasitized blowflies, he derived a model of parasite-host population regulation operating under what came to be called "density dependent" and "density independent" causal forces; Nicholson believed that only the former, population-hosted, factors led to long-term population modifications--evolution--but this position was immediately challenged by those who believed environmental, independent, forces predominated. The discussion has continued to the present, being the more or the less related to biogeography depending on whether population survival is viewed more in terms of social devices and behavior, or the exigencies of the environment (defined either in physical or locational terms).
Served in WWI with the Royal Field Artillery. 1921 - 1930 lecturer in Entomology, Sydney University. 1922 elected to the Linnean Society of New South Wales. 1926 - 1927 president of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales. 1930 - 1936 Deputy Chief, Divison of Economic Entomology, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIR). 1936 - 1960 Chief of Entomology Division, CSIR. 1951 president of Royal Society of Australia. 1952 received Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales. 1961 made CBE. 1963 made honorary member of British Ecological Society. [source: http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/chronob/NICH1895.htm] |