Evolutionary ecologist Thomas W. Schoener, a professor of zoology and environmental studies at the University of California, Davis, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, considered one of the highest national honors for faculty members. Schoener has kept close watch during the past two decades over more than 100 islands in the Bahamas. There he and his coworkers have tracked the lives and ecological relationships of lizards, birds, spiders, trees and shrubs that inhabit the scrubby subtropical terrain. While deciphering terrestrial food webs, he found that the loss of top predators in a community may indirectly affect the organisms at the web's base -- the plants -- in addition to the animals eaten by the predators. While still a graduate student, he was the first to demonstrate a certain mathematical relationship between the sizes of feeding territories and body sizes among birds. The breadth and depth of Schoener's work on the behaviorial aspects of feeding ecology helped earn him membership in another prestigious group, the National Academy of Sciences, at age 40 in 1984. His studies have suggested that predation and physical environment, among other things, may be of equal or greater importance in shaping community structure than competition between species for limited resources, which was once thought to be the primary force. Based in Cambridge, Mass., the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams and other leaders of the American revolution. Now populated by leaders from universities, government, business and the creative arts, the academy studies issues of contemporary society and public policy and also publishes the quarterly journal Dædalus. The academy now counts among its members 3400 people from a broad range of geographic, professional and cultural backgrounds, including 152 Nobel laureates and 59 Pulitzer Prize winners. Some of the other 195 new fellows elected to the academy this year include former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, authors E.L. Doctorow and Peter Matthiessen, television co-anchors James Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, television commentator Bill Moyers and playwright August Wilson.