Terminology can profoundly influence scientific research. Here, I discuss the term “species interaction,” which constitutes the core of ecology. The term has the merits of underlying many fundamental ecological ideas (e.g., competitive exclusion, trophic cascade and keystone predation) and making ecological research more interdisciplinary (e.g., biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management). Meanwhile, it has the demerits of causing problems of synonymy and polysemy, masking the fact that interactions occur at the individual level, and reinforcing the counterfactual view that an ecological community is a network of interactions between homogeneous species. This means that the facile use of the term may impede our understanding of community dynamics, which is a great concern considering recent evidence that individual heterogeneity is ubiquitous (e.g., due to ontogeny, sex and genotype) and crucial for community dynamics. To further extend the debate, I present some prospective scenarios in which future research trends may affect the importance of the terminological debate. For example, the term may obtain other definitions due to the establishment of new analytical techniques (e.g., DNA metabarcoding and causation analysis), or the debate may become obsolete if a consensus is reached that interactions occur between individuals (i.e., a paradigm shift). These arguments indicate that how we can use the term depends on how we view interactions between organisms. I suggest that multifaceted approaches that consider not only the terminology but also its associated concept and relevant research methodology are needed to overcome the issues of such ambiguous terminology and guide the future development of ecology.

中文翻译：

---

物种相互作用：重新审视其术语和概念

术语可以深刻影响科学研究。在这里，我将讨论构成生态系统核心的“物种相互作用”一词。该术语具有许多基本生态学思想的优点（例如竞争排斥，营养级联和基石捕食），并使生态学研究更具跨学科性（例如生物多样性保护和生态系统管理）。同时，它的缺点是引起同义和多义性问题，掩盖了相互作用发生在个体层面的事实，并强化了反事实观点，即生态群落是同质物种之间相互作用的网络。这意味着该术语的轻描淡写可能会妨碍我们对社区动态的理解，考虑到最近的证据表明个体异质性无处不在（例如，由于个体发育，性别和基因型所致）并且对于社区动态至关重要，因此这是一个非常令人担忧的问题。为了进一步扩大辩论范围，我介绍了一些未来的趋势，未来的研究趋势可能会影响术语辩论的重要性。例如，由于建立了新的分析技术（例如，DNA元条形码和因果分析），该术语可能获得其他定义，或者，如果达成共识，即个体之间发生相互作用（即范式转换），则辩论可能会过时。 。这些论点表明，我们如何使用该术语取决于我们如何看待生物之间的相互作用。