BiblioVault - Nearby on Shelf

Green Planet: How Plants Keep the Earth Alive
Rice, Stanley A
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Library of Congress QK901.R53 2009 | Dewey Decimal 581.7

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Plants are not just a pretty part of the landscape; they keep the entire planet, with all of its human and nonhuman inhabitants, alive. Stanley Rice documents the many ways in which plants do this by making oxygen, regulating the greenhouse effect, controlling floods, and producing all the food in the world. Plants also create natural habitats for all organisms in the world. With illustrations and clear writing for non-specialists, Green Planet helps general readers realize that if we are to rescue the Earth from environmental disaster, we must protect wild plants.

Beginning with an overview of how human civilization has altered the face of the Earth, particularly by the destruction of forests, the book details the startling consequences of these actions. Rice provides compelling reasons for government officials, economic leaders, and the public to support efforts to save threatened and endangered plants. Global campaigns to solve environmental problems with plants, such as the development of green roofs and the Green Belt Movementùa women's organization in Kenya that empowers communities worldwide to protect the environmentùshow readers that efforts to save wild plants can be successful and beneficial to the economic well-being of nations.

Through current scientific evidence, readers see that plants are vital to the ecological health of our planet and understand what can be done to lead to a betterùand greenerùfuture

Benefits of plants:

Help modulate greenhouse gases
Produce almost all oxygen in the air
Create cool shade that reduces energy costs
Prevent floods, droughts, and soil erosion
Produce all of the food in the world
Create and preserve soil
Create natural habitats
Heal the landscape after natural and human disasters

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Induced Responses to Herbivory
Richard Karban and Ian T. Baldwin
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Library of Congress QK923.K37 1997 | Dewey Decimal 571.962

Plants face a daunting array of creatures that eat them, bore into them, and otherwise use virtually every plant part for food, shelter, or both. But although plants cannot flee from their attackers, they are far from defenseless. In addition to adaptations like thorns, which may be produced in response to attack, plants actively alter their chemistry and physiology in response to damage. For instance, young potato plant leaves being eaten by potato beetles respond by producing chemicals that inhibit beetle digestive enzymes.

Over the past fifteen years, research on these induced responses to herbivory has flourished, and here Richard Karban and Ian T. Baldwin present the first comprehensive evaluation and synthesis of this rapidly developing field. They provide state-of-the-discipline reviews and highlight areas where new research will be most productive. Their comprehensive overview will be welcomed by a wide variety of theoretical and applied researchers in ecology, evolutionary biology, plant biology, entomology, and agriculture.

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Pollination Power
Heather Angel
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress QK926.A54 2016 | Dewey Decimal 571.8642

From the wings of moths to the feet of hoverflies and the head feathers of nectar-seeking birds, the process of pollination is a natural marvel. How do the many annuals and perennials and shrubs and trees that populate the globe manage to lure the aid of bees and butterflies and other creatures at exactly the appropriate time? Pollination Power offers a unique, truly bird’s-eye view of the wonders of pollination at work.

In stunning full-color images, employing the latest photographic techniques, esteemed photographer Heather Angel has captures the intimate interactions of plants with their floral pollinators. The plants come not only from Angel’s Surrey backyard and the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, but from twenty countries where Angel has travelled—from the rich floral kingdoms of the Cape of South Africa to the diversity of China and the Americas. The photos illustrate the varied techniques that flowers use to communicate with their pollinators. Some, for example, change color when the flower no longer has rewards to offer. Others control precisely when pollinators enter or leave by timing when they open and close their petals or when they emit a scent. This fascinating array of pollination repertoires crossfertilizes Angel’s photos with a descriptive text.

Featuring both common and exotic plants and temperate and tropical floral, Pollination Power will entice anyone with a passion for botanicals, from gardeners to botanists alike.

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The Forgotten Pollinators
Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan
Island Press, 1996
Library of Congress QK926.B835 1996 | Dewey Decimal 574.524

Consider this: Without interaction between animals and flowering plants, the seeds and fruits that make up nearly eighty percent of the human diet would not exist.In The Forgotten Pollinators, Stephen L. Buchmann, one of the world's leading authorities on bees and pollination, and Gary Paul Nabhan, award-winning writer and renowned crop ecologist, explore the vital but little-appreciated relationship between plants and the animals they depend on for reproduction -- bees, beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, bats, and countless other animals, some widely recognized and other almost unknown.Scenes from around the globe -- examining island flora and fauna on the Galapagos, counting bees in the Panamanian rain forest, witnessing an ancient honey-hunting ritual in Malaysia -- bring to life the hidden relationships between plants and animals, and demonstrate the ways in which human society affects and is affected by those relationships. Buchmann and Nabhan combine vignettes from the field with expository discussions of ecology, botany, and crop science to present a lively and fascinating account of the ecological and cultural context of plant-pollinator relationships.More than any other natural process, plant-pollinator relationships offer vivid examples of the connections between endangered species and threatened habitats. The authors explain how human-induced changes in pollinator populations -- caused by overuse of chemical pesticides, unbridled development, and conversion of natural areas into monocultural cropland-can have a ripple effect on disparate species, ultimately leading to a "cascade of linked extinctions."

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Protecting Pollinators: How to Save the Creatures that Feed Our World
Jodi Helmer
Island Press, 2019
Library of Congress QK926.H48 2019 | Dewey Decimal 571.8642

We should thank a pollinator at every meal. These diminutive creatures fertilize a third of the crops we eat. Yet half of the 200,000 species of pollinators are threatened. Birds, bats, insects, and many other pollinators are disappearing, putting our entire food supply in jeopardy. In North America and Europe, bee populations have already plummeted by more than a third and the population of butterflies has declined 31 percent.

Protecting Pollinators explores why the statistics have become so dire and how they can be reversed. Jodi Helmer breaks down the latest science on environmental threats and takes readers inside the most promising conservation initiatives. Efforts include famers reducing pesticides, cities creating butterfly highways, volunteers ripping up invasive plants, gardeners planting native flowers, and citizen scientists monitoring migration.

Along with inspiring stories of revival and lessons from failed projects, readers will find practical tips to get involved. They will also be reminded of the magic of pollinators—not only the iconic monarch and dainty hummingbird, but the drab hawk moth and homely bats that are just as essential. Without pollinators, the world would be a duller, blander place. Helmer shows how we can make sure they are always fluttering, soaring, and buzzing around us.

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Techniques for Pollination Biologists
Carol A. Kearns
University Press of Colorado, 1993
Library of Congress QK926.K425 1993 | Dewey Decimal 582.01662

Techniques for Pollination Biologists is the first book to incorporate all techniques published in the pollination literature as well as unpublished methods compiled from practicing pollination biologists. The bibliography includes 1,200 references from more than 200 journals, plus books and previously unpublished materials.

Appendices list sources for all the equipment and chemicals needed.

This book presents the newest techniques such as fluorescence microscopy to examine pollen tubes, high-pressure liquid chromatography for nectar analysis, and using particle counters to count pollen grains and nuclear magnetic resonance for floral odor analysis. In addition to these sophisticated methods, basic techniques are described for labeling plants, manipulating flowers, marking or excluding, and designing simple but elegant experiments with small budgets. The book also examines potential pitfalls for pollination studies and offers cautionary advice about designing and implementing different types of pollination experiments.

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Plant-Pollinator Interactions: From Specialization to Generalization
Edited by Nickolas M. Waser and Jeff Ollerton
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Library of Congress QK926.P52 2006 | Dewey Decimal 571.8642

Just as flowering plants depend on their pollinators, many birds, insects, and bats rely on plants for energy and nutrients. This plant-pollinator relationship is essential to the survival of natural and agricultural ecosystems. Plant-Pollinator Interactions portrays the intimate relationships of pollination over time and space and reveals patterns of interactions from individual to community levels, showing how these patterns change at different spatial and temporal scales.

Nickolas M. Waser and Jeff Ollerton bring together experts from around the world to offer a comprehensive analysis of pollination, including the history of thinking about specialization and generalization and a comparison of pollination to other mutualisms. An overview of current thinking and of future research priorities, Plant-Pollinator Interactions covers an important theme in evolutionary ecology with far-reaching applications in conservation and agriculture. This book will find an eager audience in specialists studying pollination and other mutualisms, as well as with biologists who are interested in ecological, evolutionary, and behavioral aspects of the specialization and generalization of species.

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Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion Of Seeds And Other Late Natural History Writings
Henry D. Thoreau; Edited by Bradley P. Dean; Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan; Introduction by Robert D. Richardson
Island Press, 1993
Library of Congress QK929.T48 1993 | Dewey Decimal 582.0467

Faith in a Seed contains the hitherto unpublished work The Dispersion of Seeds, one of Henry D. Thoreau's last important research and writing projects, and now his first new book to appear in 125 years.With the remarkable clarity and grace that characterize all of his writings, Thoreau describes the ecological succession of plant species through seed dispersal. The Dispersion of Seeds, which draws on Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, refutes the then widely accepted theory that some plants spring spontaneously to life, independent of roots, cuttings, or seeds. As Thoreau wrote: "Though I do not believe a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." Henry D. Thoreau's Faith in a Seed, was first published in hardcover in 1993 by Island Press under the Shearwater Books imprint, which unifies scientific views of nature with humanistic ones. This important work, the first publication of Thoreau's last manuscript, is now available in paperback. Faith in a Seed contains Thoreau's last important research and writing project, The Dispersion of Seeds, along with other natural history writings from late in his life. Edited by Bradley P. Dean, professor of English at East Carolina University and editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin, these writings demonstrate how a major American author at the height of his career succeeded in making science and literature mutually enriching.

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Discovering the Desert: The Legacy of the Carnegie Desert Botanical Laboratory
William G. McGinnies
University of Arizona Press, 1981
Library of Congress QK938.D4M37 | Dewey Decimal 581.52652

Now you can share the experiences of the first U.S. scientists who set about discovering the nature of North American deserts. "This is a fascinating account of how these pioneer ecologists laid the foundations for our modern knowledge of plant adaptation to desert environments. . . . It is well done." (American Scientist)

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The Changing Mile Revisited: An Ecological Study of Vegetation Change with Time in the Lower Mile of an Arid and Semiarid Region
Raymond M. Turner, Robert H. Webb, Janice E. Bowers, and James Rodney Hastings
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Library of Congress QK938.D4T87 2003 | Dewey Decimal 581.754097917

The Changing Mile, originally published in 1965, was a benchmark in ecological studies, demonstrating the prevalence of change in a seemingly changeless place. Photographs made throughout the Sonoran Desert region in the late 1800s and early 1900s were juxtaposed with photographs of the same locations taken many decades later. The nearly one hundred pairs of images revealed that climate has played a strong role in initiating many changes in the region. This new book updates the classic by adding recent photographs to the original pairs, providing another three decades of data and showing even more clearly the extent of change across the landscape. During these same three decades, abundant information about climatic variability, land use, and plant ecology has accumulated, making it possible to determine causes of change with more confidence.

Using nearly two hundred additional triplicate sets of unpublished photographs, The Changing Mile Revisited utilizes repeat photographs selected from almost three hundred stations located in southern Arizona, in the Pinacate region of Mexico, and along the coast of the Gulf of California. Coarse photogrammetric analysis of this enlarged photographic set shows the varied response of the region's major plant species to the forces of change. The images show vegetation across the entire region at sites ranging in elevation from sea level to a mile above sea level. Some sites are truly arid, while others are located above the desert in grassland and woodland. Common names are used for most plants and animals (with Latin equivalents in endnotes) to make the book more accessible to non-technical readers.

The original Changing Mile was based upon a unique set of data that allowed the authors to evaluate the extent and magnitude of vegetation change in a large geographic region. By extending the original landmark study, The Changing Mile Revisited will remain an indispensable reference for all concerned with the fragile desert environment.

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Tropical Forest Diversity and Dynamism: Findings from a Large-Scale Plot Network
Edited by Elizabeth Losos and Egbert Giles Leigh Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Library of Congress QK938.F6T725 2004 | Dewey Decimal 577.34

Long-term Forest Dynamics Plots (FDPs) allow ecologists to explain patterns in diversity and dynamics in tropical forests around the world. In this collection, Elizabeth Losos and Egbert Giles Leigh Jr. assemble extensive standardized data—collected here in one location for the first time—from sixteen tropical FDPs and synthesize the findings, putting these unique and valuable plots in a global context by highlighting the utility of the collected data for conservation and forest management.

Written by experts in the field of tropical ecology, Tropical Forest Diversity and Dynamism will appeal to students and professionals with an interest in community ecology and patterns of diversity.

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Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea
Kennedy Warne
Island Press, 2012
Library of Congress QK938.M27.L47 2011 | Dewey Decimal 578.7698

What’s the connection between a platter of jumbo shrimp at your local restaurant and murdered fishermen in Honduras, impoverished women in Ecuador, and disastrous hurricanes along America’s Gulf coast? Mangroves. Many people have never heard of these salt-water forests, but for those who depend on their riches, mangroves are indispensable. They are natural storm barriers, home to innumerable exotic creatures—from crabeating vipers to man-eating tigers—and provide food and livelihoods to millions of coastal dwellers. Now they are being destroyed to make way for shrimp farming and other coastal development. For those who stand in the way of these industries, the consequences can be deadly.

In Let Them Eat Shrimp, Kennedy Warne takes readers into the muddy battle zone that is the mangrove forest. A tangle of snaking roots and twisted trunks, mangroves are often dismissed as foul wastelands. In fact, they are supermarkets of the sea, providing shellfish, crabs, honey, timber, and charcoal to coastal communities from Florida to South America to New Zealand. Generations have built their lives around mangroves and consider these swamps sacred.

To shrimp farmers and land developers, mangroves simply represent a good investment. The tidal land on which they stand often has no title, so with a nod and wink from a compliant official, it can be turned from a public resource to a private possession. The forests are bulldozed, their traditional users dispossessed.

The true price of shrimp farming and other coastal development has gone largely unheralded in the U.S. media. A longtime journalist, Warne now captures the insatiability of these industries and the magic of the mangroves. His vivid account will make every reader pause before ordering the shrimp.

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A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers
Fred Delcomyn and James L. Ellis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021
Library of Congress QK938.P7D453 2021 | Dewey Decimal 577.44

All the makings of natural wonder in your backyard

In 2003 Fred Delcomyn imagined his backyard of two and a half acres, farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to tallgrass prairie. Over the next seventeen years, Delcomyn, with help from his friend James L. Ellis scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned these acres into prairie. In A Backyard Prairie, they document their journey and reveal the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows. It has been said, “Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.” This book shows us how.

The first book to celebrate a smaller, more private restoration, A Backyard Prairie offers a vivid portrait of what makes a prairie. Delcomyn and Ellis describe selecting and planting seeds, recount the management of a prescribed fire, and capture the prairie’s seasonal parades of colorful flowers in concert with an ever-growing variety of animals, from the minute eastern tailed-blue butterfly to the imperious red-winged blackbird and the reclusive coyote.

This book offers a unique account of their work and their discovery of a real backyard, an inviting island of grass and flowers uncovered and revealed. We often travel miles and miles to find nature larger than ourselves. In this rich account of small prairie restoration, Delcomyn and Ellis encourage the revival of original prairie in our backyards and the patient, beauty-seeking soul sleeping within ourselves.

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The Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities
John T. Curtis
University of Wisconsin Press, 1959
Library of Congress QK941.W6C8 1972 | Dewey Decimal 581.9775

One of the most important contributions in the field of plant ecology during the twentieth century, this definitive survey established the geographical limits, species compositions, and as much as possible of the environmental relations of the communities composing the vegetation of Wisconsin.

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The Evolutionary Biology of Plants
Karl J. Niklas
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Library of Congress QK980.N55 1997 | Dewey Decimal 581.38

Although they are among the most abundant of all living things and provide essential oxygen,
food, and shelter to the animal kingdom, few books pay any attention to how and why plants
evolved the wondrous diversity we see today. In this richly illustrated and clearly written book,
Karl J. Niklas provides the first comprehensive synthesis of modern evolutionary biology as it
relates to plants.

After presenting key evolutionary principles, Niklas recounts the saga of plant life from its
origins to the radiation of the flowering plants. To investigate how living plants might have
evolved, Niklas conducts a series of computer-generated "walks" on fitness "landscapes,"
arriving at hypothetical forms of plant life strikingly similar to those of today and the distant
past. He concludes with an extended consideration of molecular biology and paleontology.

An excellent overview for undergraduates, this book will also challenge graduate students and
researchers.

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Plant Evolution: An Introduction to the History of Life
Karl J. Niklas
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress QK980.N556 2016 | Dewey Decimal 581.38

Although plants comprise more than 90% of all visible life, and land plants and algae collectively make up the most morphologically, physiologically, and ecologically diverse group of organisms on earth, books on evolution instead tend to focus on animals. This organismal bias has led to an incomplete and often erroneous understanding of evolutionary theory. Because plants grow and reproduce differently than animals, they have evolved differently, and generally accepted evolutionary views—as, for example, the standard models of speciation—often fail to hold when applied to them.

Tapping such wide-ranging topics as genetics, gene regulatory networks, phenotype mapping, and multicellularity, as well as paleobotany, Karl J. Niklas’s Plant Evolution offers fresh insight into these differences. Following up on his landmark book The Evolutionary Biology of Plants—in which he drew on cutting-edge computer simulations that used plants as models to illuminate key evolutionary theories—Niklas incorporates data from more than a decade of new research in the flourishing field of molecular biology, conveying not only why the study of evolution is so important, but also why the study of plants is essential to our understanding of evolutionary processes. Niklas shows us that investigating the intricacies of plant development, the diversification of early vascular land plants, and larger patterns in plant evolution is not just a botanical pursuit: it is vital to our comprehension of the history of all life on this green planet.

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Ex Situ Plant Conservation: Supporting Species Survival In The Wild
Edited by Edward O. Guerrant Jr., Kayri Havens, and Mike Maunder; Foreword by Peter H. Raven ; Society for Ecological Restoration International Center for PlantConservation
Island Press, 2004
Library of Congress QK981.7.E9 2004 | Dewey Decimal 639.99

Faced with widespread and devastating loss of biodiversity in wild habitats, scientists have developed innovative strategies for studying and protecting targeted plant and animal species in "off-site" facilities such as botanic gardens and zoos. Such ex situ work is an increasingly important component of conservation and restoration efforts. Ex Situ Plant Conservation, edited by Edward O. Guerrant Jr., Kayri Havens, and Mike Maunder, is the first book to address integrated plant conservation strategies and to examine the scientific, technical, and strategic bases of the ex situ approach. The book examines where and how ex situ investment can best support in situ conservation. Ex Situ Plant Conservation outlines the role, value, and limits of ex situ conservation as well as updating best management practices for the field, and is an invaluable resource for plant conservation practitioners at botanic gardens, zoos, and other conservation organizations; students and faculty in conservation biology and related fields; managers of protected areas and other public and private lands; and policymakers and members of the international community concerned with species conservation.

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Gregor Mendel's Experiments on Plant Hybrids
Corcos, Alain F
Rutgers University Press, 1993
Library of Congress QK982.M4613 1993 | Dewey Decimal 581.158

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Multiplicity in Unity: Plant Subindividual Variation and Interactions with Animals
Carlos M. Herrera
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Library of Congress QK983.H47 2009 | Dewey Decimal 581.35

Plants produce a considerable number of structures of one kind, like leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds, and this reiteration is a quintessential feature of the body plan of higher plants. But since not all structures of the same kind produced by a plant are identical—for instance, different branches on a plant may be male or female, leaf sizes in the sun differ from those in the shade, and fruit sizes can vary depending on patterns of physiological allocation among branches—a single plant genotype generally produces a multiplicity of phenotypic versions of the same organ.

Multiplicity in Unity uses this subindividual variation to deepen our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary factors involved in plant-animal interactions. On one hand, phenotypic variation at the subindividual scale has diverse ecological implications for animals that eat plants. On the other hand, by choosing which plants to consume, these animals may constrain or modify plant ontogenetic patterns, developmental stability, and the extent to which feasible phenotypic variants are expressed by individuals.

An innovative study of the ecology, morphology, and evolution of modular organisms, Multiplicity in Unity addresses a topic central to our understanding of the diversity of life and the ways in which organisms have coevolved to cope with variable environments.

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Phylogeny and Evolution of the Angiosperms: Revised and Updated Edition
Douglas Soltis, Pamela Soltis, Peter Endress, Mark Chase, Steven Manchester, Walter Judd, Lucas Majure, and Evgeny Mavrodiev
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress QK989.P49 2017 | Dewey Decimal 581.38

Although they are relative latecomers on the evolutionary scene, having emerged only 135‒170 million years ago, angiosperms—or flowering plants—are the most diverse and species-rich group of seed-producing land plants, comprising more than 15,000 genera and over 350,000 species. Not only are they a model group for studying the patterns and processes of evolutionary diversification, they also play major roles in our economy, diet, and courtship rituals, producing our fruits, legumes, and grains, not to mention the flowers in our Valentine’s bouquets. They are also crucial ecologically, dominating most terrestrial and some aquatic landscapes.

This fully revised edition of Phylogeny and Evolution of the Angiosperms provides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the evolution of and relationships among these vital plants. Incorporating molecular phylogenetics with morphological, chemical, developmental, and paleobotanical data, as well as presenting a more detailed account of early angiosperm fossils and important fossil information for each evolutionary branch of the angiosperms, the new edition integrates fossil evidence into a robust phylogenetic framework. Featuring a wealth of new color images, this highly synthetic work further reevaluates long-held evolutionary hypotheses related to flowering plants and will be an essential reference for botanists, plant systematists, and evolutionary biologists alike.

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The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist
Carol Grant Gould
Island Press, 2004
Library of Congress QL31.B37G68 2004 | Dewey Decimal 508.092

When William Beebe needed to know what was going on in the depths of the ocean, he had himself lowered a half-mile down in a four-foot steel sphere to see-five times deeper than anyone had ever gone in the 1930s. When he wanted to trace the evolution of pheasants in 1910, he trekked on foot through the mountains and jungles of the Far East to locate every species. To decipher the complex ecology of the tropics, he studied the interactions of every creature and plant in a small area from the top down, setting the emerging field of tropical ecology into dynamic motion.

William Beebe's curiosity about the natural world was insatiable, and he did nothing by halves. As the first biographer to see the letters and private journals Beebe kept from 1887 until his death in 1962, science writer Carol Grant Gould brings the life and times of this groundbreaking scientist and explorer compellingly to light.

From the Galapagos Islands to the jungles of British Guiana, from the Bronx Zoo to the deep seas, Beebe's biography is a riveting adventure. A best-selling author in his own time, Beebe was a fearless explorer and thoughtful scientist who put his life on the line in pursuit of knowledge. The unique glimpses he provided into the complex web of interactions that keeps the earth alive and breathing have inspired generations of conservationists and ecologists. This exciting biography of a great naturalist brings William Beebe at last to the recognition he deserves.

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The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language
Tania Munz
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress QL31.F7M959 2016 | Dewey Decimal 595.799

We think of bees as being among the busiest workers in the garden, admiring them for their productivity. But amid their buzzing, they are also great communicators—and unusual dancers. As Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) discovered during World War II, bees communicate the location of food sources to each other through complex circle and waggle dances. For centuries, beekeepers had observed these curious movements in hives, and others had speculated about the possibility of a bee language used to manage the work of the hive. But it took von Frisch to determine that the bees’ dances communicated precise information about the distance and direction of food sources. As Tania Munz shows in this exploration of von Frisch’s life and research, this important discovery came amid the tense circumstances of the Third Reich.

The Dancing Bees draws on previously unexplored archival sources in order to reveal von Frisch’s full story, including how the Nazi government in 1940 determined that he was one-quarter Jewish, revoked his teaching privileges, and sought to prevent him from working altogether until circumstances intervened. In the 1940s, bee populations throughout Europe were facing the devastating effects of a plague (just as they are today), and because the bees were essential to the pollination of crops, von Frisch’s research was deemed critical to maintaining the food supply of a nation at war. The bees, as von Frisch put it years later, saved his life. Munz not only explores von Frisch’s complicated career in the Third Reich, she looks closely at the legacy of his work and the later debates about the significance of the bee language and the science of animal communication.

This first in-depth biography of von Frisch paints a complex and nuanced portrait of a scientist at work under Nazi rule. The Dancing Bees will be welcomed by anyone seeking to better understand not only this chapter of the history of science but also the peculiar waggles of our garden visitors.

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Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: A Visionary Naturalist
Herve Le Guyader
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Library of Congress QL31.G4G8913 2004 | Dewey Decimal 590.92

A professor at twenty-one and member of the Napoleon's Egyptian expedition at twenty-six, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a man of one idea, which he formulated when he was twenty-four. Nature, he thought, had formed all living beings with one single plan.

This was a revolutionary idea—and one vigorously opposed by Geoffroy's colleague Georges Cuvier, a great anatomist and one of the giants of French science. In 1830, their long-running disagreement erupted into furious public debate. Geoffroy argued that all vertebrates shared the same basic body plan not just with each other but with insects as well. Cuvier strenuously disputed this idea, which he saw as tantamount to a belief in "transformism"—arguing instead that each species had its own special and permanent form.

With Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Hervé Le Guyader provides an analysis not only of that infamous debate but also of Geoffroy's bold intuitions about anatomy and development. Featuring Geoffroy's published version of the 1830 debates—translated into English for the first time—the book also illustrates how Geoffroy's prescient insights foreshadowed some of the most recent discoveries in evolutionary and developmental biology.

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In a Patch of Fireweed
Bernd HEINRICH
Harvard University Press, 1984
Library of Congress QL31.H42A33 1984 | Dewey Decimal 574

Mean and Lowly Things
Kate Jackson
Harvard University Press, 2008
Library of Congress QL31.J23A3 2008 | Dewey Decimal 597.96096724

In 2005 Jackson ventured into the remote swamp forests of the northern Congo to collect reptiles and amphibians. This book is Jackson's unvarnished account of her research on the front lines of the global biodiversity crisis—coping with interminable delays in obtaining permits, learning to outrun advancing army ants, subsisting on a diet of Spam and manioc, and ultimately falling in love with the strangely beautiful flooded forest.

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Into Africa
Craig Packer
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Library of Congress QL31.P15A3 1994 | Dewey Decimal 599.05109676

Craig Packer takes us into Africa for a journey of fifty-two days in the fall of 1991. But this is more than a tour of magnificent animals in an exotic, faraway place. A field biologist since 1972, Packer began his work studying primates at Gombe and then the lions of the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater with his wife and colleague Anne Pusey. Here, he introduces us to the real world of fieldwork—initiating assistants to lion research in the Serengeti, helping a doctoral student collect data, collaborating with Jane Goodall on primate research.

As in the works of George Schaller and Cynthia Moss, Packer transports us to life in the field. He is addicted to this land—to the beauty of a male lion striding across the Serengeti plains, to the calls of a baboon troop through the rain forests of Gombe—and to understanding the animals that inhabit it. Through his vivid narration, we feel the dust and the bumps of the Arusha Road, smell the rosemary in the air at lunchtime on a Serengeti verandah, and hear the lyrics of the Grateful Dead playing off bootlegged tapes.

Into Africa also explores the social lives of the animals and the threats to their survival. Packer grapples with questions he has passionately tried to answer for more than two decades. Why do female lions raise their young in crèches? Why do male baboons move from troop to troop while male chimps band together? How can humans and animals continue to coexist in a world of diminishing resources? Immediate demands—logistical nightmares, political upheavals, physical exhaustion—yield to the larger inescapable issues of the interdependence of the land, the animals, and the people who inhabit it.

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Escaping into Nature: The Making of a Sportsman-Conservationist and Environmental Historian
John F. Reiger
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Library of Congress QL31.R44A3 2013 | Dewey Decimal 639.9

“It was only by escaping into nature that I could obtain the peace and harmony I sought.” —from the Introduction

In Escaping into Nature, prominent wildlife conservationist and environmental historian John Reiger shares his story of an angler and hunter who found a cause and a calling and combined them for his life’s work.

John Reiger’s outdoor adventures as a young man primed him for the teachings of the great sportsmen-conservationists of the past, particularly George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold. Inspired by these conservation giants, Reiger left the security of a tenured professorship to serve as executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society where he, sometimes controversially, put his ideals into practice. Later, he resumed his academic career to illuminate the lives of early wildlife conservationists, visionaries who continue to inspire us to care deeply about the future of the natural world.

Abused psychologically within his family in his early years, Reiger found solace in nature. Though he first entered the outdoors as an escape from his unpleasant circumstances, he soon found the study and pursuit of insects, fishes, and birds to be exciting ends in themselves. He came to believe that it was only by participating in the life and death of other creatures that one could learn to truly value the natural world, be a part of it, and be inspired to work for its conservation.

John Reiger’s autobiography is also the story of his own developing fascination with America’s past, especially as it relates to human interaction with the natural world; his desire to share that passion with others; and his experiences on the road to becoming a nationally recognized scholar. The twists and turns of that journey, and his accounts of the people—and of the wild creatures—who helped him along the way, will appeal to history enthusiasts and nature lovers alike.

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Charles Valentine Riley: Founder of Modern Entomology
W. Conner Sorensen, Edward H. Smith, and Janet R. Smith, with Donald C. Weber
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Library of Congress QL31.R5S67 2019 | Dewey Decimal 595.7092

Riley propelled entomology from a collector’s parlor hobby of the nineteenth century to the serious study of insects in the Modern Age

This definitive biography is the first full account of a fascinating American scientist whose leadership created the modern science of entomology that recognizes both the essential role of insects in natural systems and their challenge to the agricultural food supply that sustains humankind. Charles Valentine Riley: Founder of Modern Entomology tells the story of how Riley (1843–1895), a young British immigrant to America—with classical schooling, only a smattering of natural history knowledge, and with talent in art and writing but no formal training in science—came to play a key role in the reorientation of entomology from the collection and arrangement of specimens to a scientific approach to insect evolution, diversity, ecology, and applied management of insect pests.

Drawing on Riley’s personal diaries, family records, correspondence, and publications, the authors trace Riley’s career as farm laborer, Chicago journalist, Missouri State Entomologist, chief federal entomologist, founder of the National Insect Collection, and initiator of the professional organization that became the Entomological Society of America. Also examined in detail are his spectacular campaigns against the Rocky Mountain Locust that stalled western migration in the 1870s, the Grape Phylloxera that threatened French vineyards in the 1870s and 80s, the Cotton Worm that devastated southern cotton fields after the Civil War, and the Cottony Cushion Scale that threatened the California citrus industry in the 1880s. The latter was defeated through importation of the Vedalia Beetle from Australia, the spectacular first example of biological control of an invasive insect pest by its introduced natural enemy.

A striking figure in appearance and deed, Riley combined scientific, literary, artistic, and managerial skills that enabled him to influence every aspect of entomology. A correspondent of Darwin and one of his most vocal American advocates, he discovered the famous example of mimicry of the Monarch butterfly by the Viceroy, and described the intricate coevolution of yucca moths and yuccas, a complex system that fascinates evolutionary scientists to this day. Whether applying evolutionary theory to pest control, promoting an American silk industry, developing improved spray technologies, or promoting applied entomology in state and federal government and to the public, Riley was the central figure in the formative years of the entomology profession. In addition to showcasing his own renderings of the insects he investigated, this comprehensive account provides fresh insight into the personal and public life of an ingenious, colorful, and controversial scientist, who aimed to discover, understand, and outsmart the insects.

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Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935–1941
Stephen Lyn Bales
University of Tennessee Press, 2010
Library of Congress QL31.T346B35 2010 | Dewey Decimal 598.092

“Everyone who is interested in the ivory-billed woodpecker will want to read this book—from scientists who wish to examine the data from all the places Tanner explored to the average person who just wants to read a compelling story.”
—Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird: The Rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

In 1935 naturalist James T. Tanner was a twenty-one-year-old graduate student when he saw his first ivory-billed woodpecker, one of America’s Istudent when he saw his first ivory-billed woodpecker, one of America’s rarest birds, in a remote swamp in northern Louisiana. At the time, he rarest birds, in a remote swamp in northern Louisiana. At the time, he was part of an ambitious expedition traveling across the country to record and photograph as many avian species as possible, a trip organized by Dr. Arthur Allen, founder of the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Two years later, Tanner hit the road again, this time by himself and in search of only one species—that ever-elusive ivory-bill. Sponsored by Cornell and the Audubon Society, Jim Tanner’s work would result in some of the most extensive field research ever conducted on the magnificent woodpecker.

Drawing on Tanner’s personal journals and written with the cooperation of his widow, Nancy, Ghost Birds recounts, in fascinating detail, the scientist’s
dogged quest for the ivory-bill as he chased down leads in eight southern states. With Stephen Lyn Bales as our guide, we experience the same awe and excitement that Tanner felt when he returned to the Louisiana wetland he had visited earlier and was able to observe and document several of the “ghost birds”—including a nestling that he handled, banded, and photographed at close range. Investigating the ivory-bill was particularly urgent because it was a fast-vanishing species, the victim of indiscriminant specimen hunting and widespread logging that was destroying its habitat. As sightings became rarer and rarer in the decades following Tanner’s remarkable research, the bird was feared to have become extinct. Since 2005, reports of sightings in Arkansas and Florida made headlines and have given new hope to ornithologists and bird lovers, although extensive subsequent investigations have yet to produce definitive confirmation.

Before he died in 1991, Jim Tanner himself had come to believe that the majestic woodpeckers were probably gone forever, but he remained hopeful
that someone would prove him wrong. This book fully captures Tanner’s determined spirit as he tracked down what was then, as now, one of ornithology’s true Holy Grails.

STEPHEN LYN BALES is a naturalist at the Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville,
Tennessee. He is the author of Natural Histories, published by UT Press in 2007.

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Alexander Wilson
Edward H. Burtt Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress QL31.W7B87 2013 | Dewey Decimal 598.092

On the bicentennial of his death, this beautifully illustrated volume pays tribute to the Scot who became the father of American ornithology. Alexander Wilson made unique contributions to ecology and animal behavior. His drawings of birds in realistic poses in their natural habitat inspired Audubon, Spencer Fullerton Baird, and other naturalists.

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Albertus Magnus On Animals V1 2: A Medieval Summa Zoologica Revised Edition
Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.and Irven Michael Resnick
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Library of Congress QL41.A3413 2018 | Dewey Decimal 590

Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.

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Questions concerning Aristotle's On Animals (The Fathers of the Church, Mediaeval Continuation, Volume 9)
Irven M. Albert the Great
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
Library of Congress QL41.A34513 2008 | Dewey Decimal 590

This text, the Questions concerning Aristotle's On Animals [Quaestiones super de animalibus], recovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century and never before translated in its entirety, represents Conrad of Austria's report on a series of disputed questions that Albert the Great addressed in Cologne ca. 1258.

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The Paper Zoo: 500 Years of Animals in Art
Charlotte Sleigh
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Library of Congress QL46.5.S545 2017 | Dewey Decimal 591.0222

As children, our first encounters with the world’s animals do not arise during expeditions through faraway jungles or on perilous mountain treks. Instead, we meet these creatures between the pages of a book, on the floor of an obliging library. Down through the centuries, illustrated books have served as our paper zoos, both documenting the world’s extraordinary wildlife in exquisite detail and revealing, in hindsight, how our relationship to and understanding of these animals have evolved over time.

In this stunning book, historian of science Charlotte Sleigh draws on the ultimate bibliophile’s menagerie—the collections of the British Library—to present a lavishly illustrated homage to this historical collaboration between art and science. Gathering together a breathtaking range of nature illustrations from manuscripts, prints, drawings, and rare printed books from across the world, Sleigh brings us face to face (or face to tentacle) with images of butterflies, beetles, and spiders, of shells, fish, and coral polyps. Organized into four themed sections—exotic, native, domestic, and paradoxical—the images introduce us to some of the world’s most renowned natural history illustrators, from John James Audubon to Mark Catesby and Ernst Haeckel, as well as to lesser-known artists. In her accompanying text, Sleigh traces the story of the art of natural history from the Renaissance through the great age of exploration and into the nineteenth century, offering insight into the changing connections between the natural and human worlds.

But the story does not end there. From caterpillars to crabs, langurs to dugongs, stick insects to Old English pigs; from the sinuous tail feathers of birds of paradise to the lime-green wings of New Zealand’s enormous flightless parrot, the kakapo; from the crenellated plates of a tortoise’s shell to imagined likenesses of unicorns, mermaids, and dinosaurs, the story continues in this book. It is a Paper Zoo for all time.

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The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary
Caspar Henderson
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress QL50.H463B66 2013 | Dewey Decimal 591.68

From medieval bestiaries to Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, we’ve long been enchanted by extraordinary animals, be they terrifying three-headed dogs or asps impervious to a snake charmer’s song. But bestiaries are more than just zany zoology—they are artful attempts to convey broader beliefs about human beings and the natural order. Today, we no longer fear sea monsters or banshees. But from the infamous honey badger to the giant squid, animals continue to captivate us with the things they can do and the things they cannot, what we know about them and what we don’t.

With The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Caspar Henderson offers readers a fascinating, beautifully produced modern-day menagerie. But whereas medieval bestiaries were often based on folklore and myth, the creatures that abound in Henderson’s book—from the axolotl to the zebrafish—are, with one exception, very much with us, albeit sometimes in depleted numbers. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings transports readers to a world of real creatures that seem as if they should be made up—that are somehow more astonishing than anything we might have imagined. The yeti crab, for example, uses its furry claws to farm the bacteria on which it feeds. The waterbear, meanwhile, is among nature’s “extreme survivors,” able to withstand a week unprotected in outer space. These and other strange and surprising species invite readers to reflect on what we value—or fail to value—and what we might change.

A powerful combination of wit, cutting-edge natural history, and philosophical meditation, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is an infectious and inspiring celebration of the sheer ingenuity and variety of life in a time of crisis and change.

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The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris
Anita Guerrini
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress QL51.2.F8G84 2015 | Dewey Decimal 590.760944361

The Courtiers' Anatomists is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV's Paris--and the surprising links between them. Examining the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how anatomy and natural history were connected through animal dissection and vivisection. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Parisian scientists, with the support of the king, dissected hundreds of animals from the royal menageries and the streets of Paris. Guerrini is the first to tell the story of Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who performed violent, riot-inducing dissections of both animal and human bodies before the king at Versailles and in front of hundreds of spectators at the King's Garden in Paris. At the Paris Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, Claude Perrault, with the help of Duverney’s dissections, edited two folios in the 1670s filled with lavish illustrations by court artists of exotic royal animals.

Through the stories of Duverney and Perrault, as well as those of Marin Cureau de la Chambre, Jean Pecquet, and Louis Gayant, The Courtiers' Anatomists explores the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal, as well as the origins of the natural history museum and the relationship between science and other cultural activities, including art, music, and literature.

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Nature's Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America’s Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species
Mary Anne Andrei
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Library of Congress QL63.A547 2020 | Dewey Decimal 590.752

It may be surprising to us now, but the taxidermists who filled the museums, zoos, and aquaria of the twentieth century were also among the first to become aware of the devastating effects of careless human interaction with the natural world.

Witnessing firsthand the decimation caused by hide hunters, commercial feather collectors, whalers, big game hunters, and poachers, these museum taxidermists recognized the existential threat to critically endangered species and the urgent need to protect them. The compelling exhibits they created—as well as the scientific field work, popular writing, and lobbying they undertook—established a vital leadership role in the early conservation movement for American museums that persists to this day.

Through their individual research expeditions and collective efforts to arouse demand for environmental protections, this remarkable cohort—including William T. Hornaday, Carl E. Akeley, and several lesser-known colleagues—created our popular understanding of the animal world and its fragile habitats. For generations of museum visitors, they turned the glass of an exhibition case into a window on nature—and a mirror in which to reflect on our responsibility for its conservation.

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Elton's Ecologists: A History of the Bureau of Animal Population
Peter Crowcroft
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Library of Congress QL69.G72U553 1991 | Dewey Decimal 591.5071142574

From its creation by Charles Elton in 1932 to its demise when he retired in 1967, the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford was a mecca for ecologists from around the world. Crowcroft provides an anecdotal history of this small research institute that so strongly influenced the development of modern animal ecology.

"[This] is a very good account of the work and personal interactions of a group that played an important part in the development of animal ecology in the period 1930-60."—John Krebs, TREE

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Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum
Mary P. Winsor
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Library of Congress QL71.U62C358 1991 | Dewey Decimal 574.012

Reading the Shape of Nature vividly recounts the turbulent early history of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the contrasting careers of its founder Louis Agassiz and his son Alexander. Through the story of this institution and the individuals who formed it, Mary P. Winsor explores the conflicting forces that shaped systematics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Debates over the philosophical foundations of classification, details of taxonomic research, the young institution's financial struggles, and the personalities of the men most deeply involved are all brought to life.

In 1859, Louis Agassiz established the Museum of Comparative Zoology to house research on the ideal types that he believed were embodied in all living forms. Agassiz's vision arose from his insistence that the order inherent in the diversity of life reflected divine creation, not organic evolution. But the mortar of the new museum had scarcely dried when Darwin's Origin was published. By Louis Agassiz's death in 1873, even his former students, including his son Alexander, had defected to the evolutionist camp. Alexander, a self-made millionaire, succeeded his father as director and introduced a significantly different agenda for the museum.

To trace Louis and Alexander's arguments and the style of science they established at the museum, Winsor uses many fascinating examples that even zoologists may find unfamiliar. The locus of all this activity, the museum building itself, tells its own story through a wonderful series of archival photographs.

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The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation
Edited by Ben A. Minteer, Jane Maienschein, and James P. Collins
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress QL76.A75 2018 | Dewey Decimal 590.73

Scores of wild species and ecosystems around the world face a variety of human-caused threats, from habitat destruction and fragmentation to rapid climate change. But there is hope, and it, too, comes in a most human form: zoos and aquariums. Gathering a diverse, multi-institutional collection of leading zoo and aquarium scientists as well as historians, philosophers, biologists, and social scientists, The Ark and Beyond traces the history and underscores the present role of these organizations as essential conservation actors. It also offers a framework for their future course, reaffirming that if zoos and aquariums make biodiversity conservation a top priority, these institutions can play a vital role in tackling conservation challenges of global magnitude.

While early menageries were anything but the centers of conservation that many zoos are today, a concern with wildlife preservation has been an integral component of the modern, professionally run zoo since the nineteenth century. From captive breeding initiatives to rewilding programs, zoos and aquariums have long been at the cutting edge of research and conservation science, sites of impressive new genetic and reproductive techniques. Today, their efforts reach even further beyond recreation, with educational programs, community-based conservation initiatives, and international, collaborative programs designed to combat species extinction and protect habitats at a range of scales. Addressing related topics as diverse as zoo animal welfare, species reintroductions, amphibian extinctions, and whether zoos can truly be “wild,” this book explores the whole range of research and conservation practices that spring from zoos and aquariums while emphasizing the historical, scientific, and ethical traditions that shape these efforts. Also featuring an inspiring foreword by the late George Rabb, president emeritus of the Chicago Zoological Society / Brookfield Zoo, The Ark and Beyond illuminates these institutions’ growing significance to the preservation of global biodiversity in this century.

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Sailing with Noah: Stories from the World of Zoos
Jeffrey P. Bonner
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Library of Congress QL76.B66 2006 | Dewey Decimal 590.73

Written by the president of the nation’s number-one zoo, Sailing with Noah is an intensely personal, behind-the-scenes look at modern zoos. Jeffrey P. Bonner, who was trained as an anthropologist and came to the zoo world quite by accident, shares some of the most compelling stories ever told about contemporary zoos. The stories jump between zoos in different cities and between countries on different continents. Some are fun and funny. Others are sad, even tragic. Pete Hoskins, the director of the Philadelphia Zoo, is in bed, sound asleep, when his phone rings. . . . “There’s been a fire in the World of Primates,” he is told. “You’ve got to get over here.” Whatever he has been dreaming, it is nothing like the nightmare he will find now that he is awake. . . . “They’re all gone. They’re all gone.” All of the animals in the building—the gorillas, the lemurs, the orangutans, and the gibbons—all twenty-three of them are dead.

Written in a lively, accessible style, Sailing with Noah explores the role of zoos in today’s society and their future as institutions of education, conservation, and research. Along the way, Bonner relates a variety of true stories about animals and those who care for them (or abuse them), offering his perspective on heavily publicized incidents and describing less-well-known events with compassion and humor in turn. By bringing the stories of the animals’ lives before us, Bonner gives them a voice. He strongly believes that zoos must act for living things, and he argues that conservation is a shared responsibility of all mankind. This book helps us to understand why biodiversity is important and what it means to be a steward of life on earth.

From the day-to-day aspects of caring for some of the world’s most exotic creatures to the role of zoos as field conservation organizations, saving wild things in wild places, this book takes the reader on an incredible journey—a journey that begins within the zoo and continues around the globe. Everyone—from zoo visitors to animal lovers to professional conservationists, the young and old alike—will be fascinated by this extraordinary book.

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