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At the edge
392
Forum
TRENDS in Ecology & Evolution Vol.17 No.8 August 2002
Book Review
At the edge Life at the Limits: Organisms in Extreme Environments by David A. Wharton. Cambridge University Press, 2002. £18.95 hbk (307 pages) ISBN 0 521 78212 0
Since I was a child, I have been romanced by life that exists in extreme environments. My first relationship was with the myriad invertebrates that make a living under the salty rigors of estuarine life. As I grew older, I followed the seabed ever deeper, to submarine hot springs, sustaining my passion for life that exists so far outside the bounds of my own tolerance as to seem otherworldly. David Wharton, a New Zealand nematologist and filmmaker, tracked a different path to the extreme, first studying the survival strategies of nematodes living under extreme thermal and chemical insult in the laboratory. In recent years, he has hunted wild nematodes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, where a lack of precipitation for at least the past two million years connotes extreme. In Life at the Limits, Wharton presents a zoologist’s natural history of a range of tolerant organisms. It is an easy read, accessible to the nonexpert, and is suitable as reading for a seminar discussion for undergraduates not specializing in biology. The focus of Life at the Limits is mostly on invertebrates, but there is scattered attention to vertebrates (e.g. Antarctic teleosts and Emperor penguins, overwintering frogs and turtles), and even some notice of vegetation, such as mosses and lichens above the treeline, resurrection plants, and the giant lobelias of Mt Kenya. Bacteria and Archaea, which can be most catholic in their extremes, are not particularly featured, although there are a few pages devoted to the subsurface biosphere and to the Archaea and Bacteria of deep-sea hot springs. http://tree.trends.com
As an instructor of invertebrate biology, I take no exception to the invertebratecentric modus operandi. I enjoyed a harvest of exemplars of cryobiosis, anhydrobiosis, thermobiosis, and so on, that I might use to enhance my teaching, although much of what is presented can be found in any good invertebrate zoology text. As for mechanistic underpinnings, Wharton’s work falls short and the lay reader who wishes to be guided in this direction might choose to supplement Life at the Limits with Life on the Edge: Amazing Creatures Thriving in Extreme Environments by Michael Gross [1]. Both Wharton and Gross include the obligatory chapter (ultimate in Life on the Edge; penultimate in Life at the Limits) on the potential for life on other planets, introducing budding scientists to the rapidly developing field of astrobiology. Cindy Lee Van Dover Biology Dept, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23187, USA. e-mail: [email protected] Reference 1 Gross, M. (1998) Life on the Edge: Amazing Creatures Thriving in Extreme Environments, Plenum Trade
Published online: 06 June 2002
Burning issues down under Flammable Australia: The Fire Regimes and Biodiversity of a Continent edited by Ross A. Bradstock, Jann E. Williams and , A. Malcolm Gill. Cambridge University Press, 2002. £90.00 hbk (ix + 462 pages) ISBN 0 521 80591 0
You will struggle to find references to fire in general textbooks on ecology, conservation biology or biogeography, in spite of the fact that large parts of the world burn and there is a considerable literature on the ecology of fire and its use
for managing ecosystems. This book on fire in Australia shows both how pervasive fire is in shaping ecosystems but also, perhaps, why fire ecology remains a ‘ghetto’ science. For science to be of general interest, it needs to ask general questions. Flammable Australia offers the reader a mixed menu with a few chapters on general topics and many more on specific vegetation formations of Australia. If you are a fire ecologist with interests in systems with analogues in Australia, this book is indispensable. There are excellent accounts of Australian research on heathlands, ‘temperate’ grasslands (analogous to South African highveld, North American prairies) and savannahs. The writing is parochial and it is generally left to the reader to make comparisons with other parts of the world. If you have no familiarity with fire, it might be harder to extract the central tenets of ‘flammable ecology’. One of these, implicit throughout Flammable Australia, is that species exist in an assemblage because they posses life-history attributes that are compatible with the prevailing fire regime. This, in turn, depends partly on the collective properties of the plant species, because they create the ‘fuel’. This neo-clementsian view of communities has important ramifications. For example, species will not respond individualistically to climate change – they can only migrate to areas with compatible fire regimes. But fire regimes are not simply a property of climate. They vary with physical and biological features of the landscape. For example, alien grasses have invaded West Australian heathlands creating new fire regimes that have eliminated species with incompatible life histories. You will find nothing in this book about competition for resources. Community assembly and response is largely controlled by the timing of life-history events in relation to successive fires. If this is true, changes in fire regimes should trigger extinction cascades of species with incompatible life histories. Managing fire regimes is then of central importance for biodiversity conservation. Excellent chapters by Keith and others show how the life-history traits of species are used to define fire regime properties to meet conservation objectives. Conservation of flammable ecosystems
0169-5347/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Forum
TRENDS in Ecology & Evolution Vol.17 No.8 August 2002
Book Review
At the edge Life at the Limits: Organisms in Extreme Environments by David A. Wharton. Cambridge University Press, 2002. £18.95 hbk (307 pages) ISBN 0 521 78212 0
Since I was a child, I have been romanced by life that exists in extreme environments. My first relationship was with the myriad invertebrates that make a living under the salty rigors of estuarine life. As I grew older, I followed the seabed ever deeper, to submarine hot springs, sustaining my passion for life that exists so far outside the bounds of my own tolerance as to seem otherworldly. David Wharton, a New Zealand nematologist and filmmaker, tracked a different path to the extreme, first studying the survival strategies of nematodes living under extreme thermal and chemical insult in the laboratory. In recent years, he has hunted wild nematodes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, where a lack of precipitation for at least the past two million years connotes extreme. In Life at the Limits, Wharton presents a zoologist’s natural history of a range of tolerant organisms. It is an easy read, accessible to the nonexpert, and is suitable as reading for a seminar discussion for undergraduates not specializing in biology. The focus of Life at the Limits is mostly on invertebrates, but there is scattered attention to vertebrates (e.g. Antarctic teleosts and Emperor penguins, overwintering frogs and turtles), and even some notice of vegetation, such as mosses and lichens above the treeline, resurrection plants, and the giant lobelias of Mt Kenya. Bacteria and Archaea, which can be most catholic in their extremes, are not particularly featured, although there are a few pages devoted to the subsurface biosphere and to the Archaea and Bacteria of deep-sea hot springs. http://tree.trends.com
As an instructor of invertebrate biology, I take no exception to the invertebratecentric modus operandi. I enjoyed a harvest of exemplars of cryobiosis, anhydrobiosis, thermobiosis, and so on, that I might use to enhance my teaching, although much of what is presented can be found in any good invertebrate zoology text. As for mechanistic underpinnings, Wharton’s work falls short and the lay reader who wishes to be guided in this direction might choose to supplement Life at the Limits with Life on the Edge: Amazing Creatures Thriving in Extreme Environments by Michael Gross [1]. Both Wharton and Gross include the obligatory chapter (ultimate in Life on the Edge; penultimate in Life at the Limits) on the potential for life on other planets, introducing budding scientists to the rapidly developing field of astrobiology. Cindy Lee Van Dover Biology Dept, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23187, USA. e-mail: [email protected] Reference 1 Gross, M. (1998) Life on the Edge: Amazing Creatures Thriving in Extreme Environments, Plenum Trade
Published online: 06 June 2002
Burning issues down under Flammable Australia: The Fire Regimes and Biodiversity of a Continent edited by Ross A. Bradstock, Jann E. Williams and , A. Malcolm Gill. Cambridge University Press, 2002. £90.00 hbk (ix + 462 pages) ISBN 0 521 80591 0
You will struggle to find references to fire in general textbooks on ecology, conservation biology or biogeography, in spite of the fact that large parts of the world burn and there is a considerable literature on the ecology of fire and its use
for managing ecosystems. This book on fire in Australia shows both how pervasive fire is in shaping ecosystems but also, perhaps, why fire ecology remains a ‘ghetto’ science. For science to be of general interest, it needs to ask general questions. Flammable Australia offers the reader a mixed menu with a few chapters on general topics and many more on specific vegetation formations of Australia. If you are a fire ecologist with interests in systems with analogues in Australia, this book is indispensable. There are excellent accounts of Australian research on heathlands, ‘temperate’ grasslands (analogous to South African highveld, North American prairies) and savannahs. The writing is parochial and it is generally left to the reader to make comparisons with other parts of the world. If you have no familiarity with fire, it might be harder to extract the central tenets of ‘flammable ecology’. One of these, implicit throughout Flammable Australia, is that species exist in an assemblage because they posses life-history attributes that are compatible with the prevailing fire regime. This, in turn, depends partly on the collective properties of the plant species, because they create the ‘fuel’. This neo-clementsian view of communities has important ramifications. For example, species will not respond individualistically to climate change – they can only migrate to areas with compatible fire regimes. But fire regimes are not simply a property of climate. They vary with physical and biological features of the landscape. For example, alien grasses have invaded West Australian heathlands creating new fire regimes that have eliminated species with incompatible life histories. You will find nothing in this book about competition for resources. Community assembly and response is largely controlled by the timing of life-history events in relation to successive fires. If this is true, changes in fire regimes should trigger extinction cascades of species with incompatible life histories. Managing fire regimes is then of central importance for biodiversity conservation. Excellent chapters by Keith and others show how the life-history traits of species are used to define fire regime properties to meet conservation objectives. Conservation of flammable ecosystems
0169-5347/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.