(^) Guild analysis could be much more extensively applied than it has been. Probably
the sheer bulk of biological knowledge required is rarely assembled in one or a few
people. Also, the results remain subjective (not just that, they are verbal or only quasi-
quantitative), although that could be viewed as an advantage as well as a problem.
The first edition of this book stated that, “In the present scientific climate, where
natural historic intuitions stated in words are mostly valued as poetry, ... , it will be
difficult to generate a well-funded fashion for this sort of work in science.” However,
well before that, by 1992, the paper had been cited 245 times, and Fauchald (1992)
commented on its success:
(^) “Many of our conclusions in ‘The Diet’ are outdated. We were wrong, even
spectacularly wrong sometimes. We are now in the second ‘post-diet’ generation
of papers citing the first ‘post-diet’ generation, and still, sometimes, ‘The Diet’
itself. ... ‘The Diet’ is becoming hidden behind layers of investigations with
better results and better theory, in part as consequence of its existence.”
(^) That has continued, reaching 1049 citations by the end of 2010, and we now have
third- and fourth-generation studies of exactly how benthic animals move and eat;
how they accomplish ingestion; how much they eat under different circumstances;
how digestion and assimilation proceed. We must represent the variety of those results
by only a few examples.
Benthont Movement and Feeding
(^) Both burrowing and feeding by macrobenthos have been studied primarily in