Cómo se meten ocho millones de especies en un planeta

Human beings have always been interested in nature. The first human cave paintings already depicted herds of animals and hunters. And when we started writing, more than 5,000 years ago, stock phrases were used to explain how ecosystems worked. Still, surprisingly, no one began to study ecology seriously until just over 150 years ago: it was in 1869 that Ernst Haeckel coined the term and defined it as "the study of the interactions between living organisms and their environment." Do you want to know why it is estimated that there are eight million different species on the planet and not just one or one hundred million? Why are there more species at the equator than at the poles? Why are there monkeys in South America? Or why doesn't the most competitive species beat all the others and live alone dominating the world? To answer these questions, this work takes a journey through the history of ecology to introduce the main laws that regulate ecological communities and the four basic mechanisms that determine ecosystems: evolution, dispersal, biotic and abiotic regulations, and, forlast, good luck.