From the beginnings of modern science, lakes have fulfilled a focus of attention. Doubtless, this has something to do with the lure that water bodies hold for most of us, as well as for long having been a source of food as well as water. Authors, from Aristotle to Izaak Walton, committed much common knowledge of the freshwater fauna to the formal written record, so it is still a little surprising to realise that the formal study of lakes—limnology (from the Greek word, limnos, a lake)—is scarcely more than a century in age (Forel 1895). When, yet more recently, the branch of biology concerned with how natural systems actually function (ecology) began to.
