Charles Elton married the English poet Edith Joy Scovell in 1937, a first five-year marriage to Rose Montague having ended in amicable divorce.

[4] Charles Elton was educated at Liverpool College and Oxford University, from which he graduated in zoology in 1922, with a first in his field research project and a third in the exams, and where he subsequently had his entire academic career.

While still an undergraduate, Elton assisted Julian Huxley on the 1921 Oxford University Spitsbergen expedition, where he made an ecological survey of Arctic vertebrates.

[6] His Arctic experience led to a consultancy with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1926–1931, to study fluctuating populations of animal species of interest to the fur trade.

In 1936, he was appointed reader in animal ecology at Oxford University, and Corpus Christi College elected him a senior research fellow.

During the Second World War, the Bureau of Animal Population was entrusted by the Agricultural Research Council to find efficient methods for controlling rats, mice and rabbits.

After the Second World War, Elton started a 20-year survey of animals and their interrelationships on Oxford University's Wytham estate, covering those in meadows, woods and water.

The final part of The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants deals with the issue of conservation and its importance to maintain species diversity.