Shvartz ecological rule – a look through decades

RAS Academician S. S. Shvartz, whose 100th anniversary is celebrated by ecologists in 2019, can rightly be called a harbinger of population-ecological thinking. He formulated the regularity: "specialized species are always better adapted than specialized intraspecific forms’. Polish Academician K. Petrusevich (1979) proposed to raise this regularity to the rank of “Shvartz ecological rule”. Numerous studies of warm-blooded animals (mainly mammals) inhabiting mountain regions and regions of the Far North completely confirm this rule, which is essential for modern ideas of ecological mechanisms of evolution. At the same time, it is not applicable to cold-blooded animals (fish, amphibians), and therefore it is advisable to consider this pattern from a General biological point of view as an empirical generalization.