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In 1960, Hairston, Smith, and Slobodkin published their revolutionary paper in which a relatively reductionist approach, interaction ecology, was joined to a relatively holistic one, trophic-web ecology. The paper had a stormy reception, both before publication (rejected from ECOLOGY, F. Smith, personal communication) and after (Murdoch 1966, Ehrlich and Birch 1967). The latter, carefully reasoned critiques, provoked a long clarification (Slobodkin et al. 1967). A briefversion of Hairston et al.(1960; hereafter referred to as HSS) is that the importance of competition vs. predation alternates in a terrestrial food web, such that carnivores (which have no predators) compete, herbivores (held down by carnivores) are controlled main-