His innovative thinking and research, provocative teaching, and visionary leadership helped transform ecology into a modern science, with deep links to evolution.

While absorbing the lessons of art and literature, Slobodkin developed a guiding interest in biology, which he pursued first at Bethany College in West Virginia, and later under G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1951 at the age of 23.

[2] After completing his Ph.D., Slobodkin worked for two years for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, where he developed a novel, theoretically informed hypothesis for the origin of red tides.

Slobodkin played an important role in developing this framework via his research, teaching, and his very influential book, Growth and Regulation of Animal Populations, which served as a blueprint for generations of students of ecology at all levels.

[2] At the University of Michigan Slobodkin pioneered the use of calorimetry as a tool for studying the "efficiency" of energy flow in ecosystems, a field in which his groundbreaking experimental work left a permanent legacy.

He initiated a research program on brown and green hydra that explored such problems as the joint role of food and predation on limiting population growth, and the continuum of species interactions that lie between mutualism and parasitism.

[2] Together with Nelson Hairston, Sr. and Frederick Smith, he wrote one of the most influential papers in the history of ecology, a four-page essay in The American Naturalist[4] that is still required reading for many students in this field.

Submitted under the title "Étude" (unacceptable to the editors), HSS (as the paper is often referred to, for Hairston, Smith, and Slobodkin) offered a simple but closely reasoned hypothesis for the regulation of populations at each trophic level in terrestrial ecosystems.

During a lecture at the University of Michigan, held in a basement-level auditorium where the podium was flanked by a door to the building's loading dock, he described the musical genius that blessed successive generations of the Bach family to illustrate principles of heredity.