Another step towards a unifying theory for ecosystems?

There are many ways in which methods and theories from physics can and have been applied to biology and ecology. The oldest example is the application of classical mechanics to animal movement (biomechanics), from tiny bacteria to massive whales. This application is intuitive: most people when observing an elephant lumber along would be happy to conclude that animals are machines in that they are so obviously made of moving parts designed to perform work (in its physical sense) under the constraints of elementary forces (predominantly gravity if you were an elephant!). Indeed, the potential for this link between physics and biology was foreseen by Aristotle around 2000 years before the mathematical bases of classical mechanics were founded (Nussbaum 1986).