The purpose of this seminar is to train students with self-learning ability, good scholarship, presentation skills, and understandings of ecological patterns and their underlying mechanisms. Students will select papers that are related to the issue of ecological patterns, such as Allen’s Rule, Bergmann’s Rule, James’ rule, Temperature-Size Rule, Gloger’srule, Bateman’s Principle, Biological Scaling Laws, Brown’s Rule, Cope’s Rule, Dollo’s Law, Hamilton’s Rule, Island Rule, Jordan’s Rule, Rapoport’s Rule, Rensch’s Rule, Thorson’s Rule, etc. All participants will study selected papers before the class and discuss the papers in class. Reporters also need to give a brief historical review of the selected topic, present the selected papers, and lead the discussion.