On January 21 biologist Dr. Robert Paine spoke at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Tupper Auditorium on the subject of "ecological change on a rocky shore."

The shore that he has been studying for years is about 40° north of here, on Tatoosh Island off the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in the US state of Washington. The biologist studies the intertidal zone, the area that is above water at low tide and inundated at high tide. The island he studies has few if any species in common with Panama, but Paine is here to look at the work of marine biologists in our intertidal zones and that of other biologist who study terrestrial ecology, to see if there are any common denominators.

As far as Paine is concerned, global warming is a well demonstrated reality. "There is no doubt in my mind that there is climate change underway," he said, adding that he expects the changes to get bigger. He noted a series of changes that began on and around Tatoosh Island beginning in the early 1990s, but pointed out that the relationship between climatic and ecological change is not a simple matter.

Some El Niño events clearly affected the intertidal zone's division between seaweed stands and barnacles, but some didn't. It also appears that after 1997, brown algae that was wiped out in previous El Niño years and then quickly rebounded didn't recover as before.

Moreover, global warming, which he says began with the Industrial Revolution and has accelerated since then, is not the only change that mankind has wrought on the ecosystem he studies. He gave as an example US legal protection and re-introduction of endangered sea otters, which had disappeared from the area but then came back to Tatoosh Island. The otters are voracious predators of sea urchins, which in turn are voracious predators of kelp. Thus the balance was disrupted and the kelp grew thicker, until killer whales came in to feast on the otters.

Is there a lesson in all this?

First, it's arrogant and foolish to think that one can mess with Mother Nature and accurately predict the results. Add a species into an eco-system and it may produce radical and unforeseen changes on the other species there. Make ocean storm season just a little bit more severe and the waves may wash away a careful balance. Combine such factors and the changes become infinitely more complicated.

Thus in the global warming debate, the politician's complaints about "fuzzy science" can get unwarranted support if scientists are too glib and pretend to know how complex systems will react to certain specified stimuli.

But Paine is here to see if there are general rules that apply to very different ecological systems. If he finds them, we might then be able to learn how to better protect fragile and important natural resources, and the specific results of humanity's tinkering with the environment may become predictable in none-too-fuzzy detail.