As a boy and into his teenage years, Gause and his extended family took summer vacations to the Caucasus Mountains in southern Russia for months at a time.
It was during these trips to the Caucasus Mountains that Gause grew fond of nature, often chronicling the lives and behavior of several organisms including the Siberian grasshopper (Aeropus sibiricus).
His chosen advisor for his undergraduate career was professor Vladimir Alpatov, who worked at the Zoological Museum of Moscow University.
Eager to pursue this mechanistic direction of study and influenced by his advisor, Gause contacted Pearl to see if the American would take on another Russian student.
In that period Gause was investigating the distribution of Orthoptera in the North Caucasus, quantitatively estimating ecoplastisity of species.
He earned his DBiolSc in 1936 for the series of works published in 1930-1934 and compiled as a dissertation titled Studies on the dynamics of mixed populations.
In 1932, Gause published what has become known as the competitive exclusion principle, based on experimental work done with mixed cultures of both yeast and Paramecium species.
The original manuscript in Russian was not published due to start of the World War II in the Soviet Union.
[7] Due to such abrupt change in scientific interests many biologists failed to unite the evolutionist and the microbiologist in one personality.