I’m sure everyone always thought, since first recognized, that if genes are important than good genes would be good. Great, even. But it took a while for Amotz Zahavi and some others to insert good genes into Darwin’s sexual selection as the cause of sometimes wild elaboration of traits, not a female aesthetic or mere runaway selection.

I’m sure wildlife biologists and others who observed whole organisms, not to mention human psychologists and anthropologists, noted the importance of the efforts parents put (or failed to put) into their offspring’s well being. But it was not until Robert Trivers pointed it out in 1972 that we realized that so much of behavioral biology is powerfully explained by organisms competing to acquire, control, direct, or interfere with this critically important resource: parental investment.

Time has always been part of the context in which ecological interactions happen, it is often the very x-axis in a graphical display of relevant variables, or the first (or second) column in a data collection form while observing life in the wild. But Eric Post argues that time is itself a resource competed for and used by organisms. It is, after all, impossible to grow, maintain, or reproduce across zero time, and the relative distribution of energy across these three pillars of life history is measured not as the amount of energy expended, but the proportion of available energy expended over a period of time, and a key variable is often not how much but when.

Organisms, as individuals but with effects that manifest at the species and co-evolutionary levels, barter in time. One of the most interesting mysteries of ecology can be understood in these terms. In places such as at my house in Minnesota there is one species of hummingbird. The hummingbirds arrive seasonally in time to take advantage of emerging nectar sources, stay around to exploit these resources as they emerge and run out through the summer and early fall, then vamoose in time to fly to the tropics as those resources are running out, sipping themselves all the way south.

But in the South American tropical rain forests, there are many species of hummingbird, some migratory but many not. There, rather than the hummingbirds timing their behavior to match the background of nectar rich sources, the nectar sources themselves behave to facility the survival of the hoards of hummingbirds humming around looking for food. It makes sense for certain kinds of trees (broken into functional groups mainly by their mode of seed production and dispersal) to flower and then fruit on a schedule matching mainly rainfall or seasonal pollinators. But those that are pollinated by non-seasonal hummingbirds have among them early flower producers and late flower producers, to the extent that as a group of species, they produce nectar bearing flowers all year round so the local hummingbirds have something to eat. Each tree species seems to be going out of its way (in time) to keep the hummingbirds alive for the next tree species up for flowering, ultimately, of course, so that those hummingbirds are alive next year! How does straight forward Darwininan thinking, or even the usual co-evolutionary conceptions of species interactions, explain how this system developed? Time is a critical co-variable with nectar production that needs to be differentiated across the year, and somehow this is managed across genera of flowering tree. To explain how that works, to even think about how that works, one needs a good theory of time in ecology.

Between how time is divided up across life history parameters (noted above: growth, maintenance, and reproduction), and how time is competed for across species in co-evolutionary syndromes, there is a lot to think about. Eric Post, in Time in Ecology: A Theoretical Framework, gives us an excellent framework for that thinking. In this book, Post puts time in perspective as a resource that drives natural selection, limits species, and helps determine the overall pattern of co-evolution and evolutionary change we observe in living systems.

Time is also important when things change (over time), and Post addresses this as well, including in reference to climate change.

(Note that Post is also the author of Ecology of Climate Change: The Importance of Biotic Interactions and Wildlife Conservation in a Changing Climate.)

This is a technical monograph, though well written and quit accessible. It will change how scientists think about certain problems, and it will serve as a textbook in graduate level or advanced undergraduate seminars or classes in ecology.

I loved that book because it did a great job integrating all the things in one place: animals, plants, habitats, evolution, etc. Even though I was working in the paleotropics at the time, I found it informative.

Then, more recently, I got a revised version of the same book. I’ve got it around somewhere. It is from the 1990s, I think. Great book, same idea as the first one, but with more in it, and a somewhat larger format. This dates to after my fieldwork in the rainforests, but overlapped with visits to arid regions in the tropics, though again, I’m paleo and the book is neo, but still great.

Then, I got a new copy of f Kircher’s book, The New Neotropical Companion. I got this one in the future! (Not quite published yet, but I think you can actually get it now.

This is a serious book. To a large extent, the intended audience is folks who plan to travel in the neotropics and want a strong background in areas of evolutionary biology and conservation. But the book is very high level in terms of the material covered, the range of facts and scope of theoretical work brought to bear, and so on. It is easy to read, even engaging to read, but it is very very rich in content.

So, the book includes information on traveling, and seeing nature on your trip. But then it includes all that information on the nature itself. It is not a small book, not a field guide format (as the first version was), but it is worth lugging around if you are doing some serious visiting.

Or, if you are simply a student of the tropics, evolutionary biology, or nature (not and, but or, on all of that) this book will be an excellent addition to your library.

And, it should be in school libraries, and on the shelves of biology teachers. There are many well developed examples of wildlife and evolution in here, that can be expand on with further literature review (and the book provides a handle on that) for developing in class projects.

I’ve put the table of contents below. As you can see, the book is well organized and covers a lot of material. Also, it is a well produced (as is typical for this publisher, Princeton) and nice looking.

The author, John Kricher, is a biology professor at Wheaton. He’s also written: Galápagos: A Natural History, Tropical Ecology, A Field Guide to California and Pacific Northwest Forests (Peterson Field Guides), By John Kricher – The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth, and a couple of book on tape thingies such as Ecological Planet – An Introduction to Earth’s Major Ecosystems: The Modern Scholar (well, not really tape, of course).

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface 9
Acknowledgments 11
How to Use This Book 12
1 Welcome to the Torrid Zone 15
2 Why It Is Hot, Humid, and Rainy in the Tropics 29
3 Rain Forest: The Realm of the Plants 39
4 Finding Animals in Rain Forest 58
5 Sun Plus Rain Equals Rain Forest 73
6 Essential Dirt: Soils and Cycling 81
7 If a Tree Falls . . . Rain Forest Disturbance Dynamics 95
8 Evolutionary Cornucopia 113
9 Why Are There So Many Species? 134
10 Tropical Intimacy: Mutualism and Coevolution 155
11 Evolutionary Arms Races: More Coevolution, More Complexity 181
12 Cruising the Rivers to the Sea 205
13 Scaling the Andes 235
14 Don’t Miss the Savannas and Dry Forests 250
15 Neotropical Birds: The Bustling Crowd 262
16 From Monkeys to Tarantulas: Endless Eccentricities 319
17 Human Ecology in the Tropics 365
18 The Future of the Neotropics 377
Appendix Words of Caution: Be Sure to Read This 389
Further Reading 392
Index 417

He felt many had written off the Gulf as a post-environmental disaster dead zone. While environmental effects in the Gulf are certainly very important, it is still a living, thriving ecosystem, the product of Candelmo’s work, Glorious Gulf of Mexico: Life Below the Blue, attests to this.

This is a stunning coffee table type book (but inexpensive, and soft bound) with some really amazing photography. Anybody who works, lives, fishes, dives, or just hangs out along the Gulf will enjoy this book. The book is 156 pages, large format, printed on nice paper, excellent photographic imagery.

This is not just a pretty picture book, but also provides very well written and interesting information on the various subjects of the photographs.

Cancelmo is also the author of Texas Coral Reefs.

This is the molecular biologist Sean Carroll, as distinct from the physicist (who wrote this).

Homeostasis is one of the basic principles of biology. The term can be applied broadly to mean that certain numbers are maintained within a certain range. This could refer to energy flowing through a system, numbers of specific cellular products like enzymes, numbers of individual organisms in an ecological system, etc. It is not so much that numbers don’t change. Change in numbers is often central to a physiological process. But the change is either demanded by a system of regulating numbers, or is a perturbation in a system that is responded to by regulation. Regulation is one of those key concepts that can be applied across pretty much all systems, and provides a powerful point of view from which to understand what is happening in any living system.

Carroll is a molecular biologist, so much of his training and work is about regulation: identifying it, characterizing it, figuring it out. What Carroll has done in this book is to apply this point of view broadly to biological systems, looking at things inside cells and things inside major ecosystems. The title of the book comes from his own experience visiting the Serengeti as a safari-going tourist, in combination with the fact that this particular ecosystem is one of the best studied in the world. Many different scientists studying everything from grass to microbes to lions to antelopes have spent countless hours observing, characterizing, and trying to explain the dynamics of the Serengeti. As Carroll points out, this is true of a number of different ecosystems, and he could well have named his book, “The Lake Erie Rules,” but that would not have been as cool of a name.

So Carroll has done, then, something that is very dangerous and often does not go well. He’s taken insight derived from his expertise in small scale, mostly sub-cellular, biological systems, and using the touchstone of regulation, applied this insight to help observe, describe, and understand biological systems generally, with a strong focus on ecology. When a scientist steps out of their normal realm to do such a thing, we often get something better ignored, because, in fact, it is not easy or, in some cases, appropriate to make this leap. In this case, however, it worked beautifully. Carroll’s book is fantastic, a success story in going form the specific to the general.

It helps that Carroll is a gifted writer, captivating and thoughtful, and highly respectful of the reader.

Carroll brings in the history of thought and research in the relevant areas of physiology, ecology etc. His messages are framed in the larger context of the Earth’s overall health and important environmental issues. He links the subject matter to key central themes in biological theory (such as natural selection and evolution). And this is all done very well.

You’ve seen the synthetic overviews of life and evolution framed in chaos theory, complexity theory, even quantum physics. This is better.

This is a book to give to your favorite biology teacher (high school or college), and that teacher will take from it examples, connections, lessons, ways of telling, that will enrich their teaching immeasurably.

I don’t think the book is available yet, but you can pre-order it.

I’m lucky in that I often get to blog from a very excellent bird watching location. Depending on which way I point, I can observe an evergreen treeline on a bluff sporting a bald eagle nest; a protected semi-island where loons nest; a marsh inhabited by transient migrants such as tundra swans or Canada geese and used by local wandering predators such as herons but owned by the blackbirds; open water with minnow filled shallows and some serious depths over which the eagle hunts, on which the loons cruise, and across which terns and gulls soar; a rocky shore ideal for kingfishers; a bit of prairie and mixed woodland with multiple species of woodpecker, warbler, titmouse; a shallow embayment for waders and the occasional wood duck; a thicket with thrushes and their kin; a looming, nearby pine forest with a whole other set of raptors. Right now the loons and their chicks are ten feet off shore in one direction, and I’m 20 feet in the other direction. If I type loudly one of them may look up to see what the sound is.

From this perspective, it is easy to make note of the science connections, and a handful of these connections have come to mind recently.

In this habitat, in my range of sight on a given day, there are a lot of species of little brown bird that eat seeds, and in some cases, they are closely related and very similar to each other, yet there is only one large raptor that eats fish. Gulls and terns fish from the sky, as do osprey, but the presence of a pair of eagles (often with one offspring) using a nest overlooking the 200 acre bay excludes those other birds almost all the time. There are several osprey in the area; I can get in the car and see osprey nests in five minutes, and on a good day find some of the actual osprey in a couple of spots around here, but I’ve only very rarely seen one here in close quarters with the eagle, and then, the osprey do not stay long. I can see terns or gulls in the distance, but rarely do I see them feeding under the eagle’s nest. So, obviously, seeds are abundant and tiny, and as a food source, diverse in the traits that make them easy or hard to find, the degree to which they are palatable, or some other features that allow many individuals across many species to feed on them. But, six to 12 inch fish feeding near the surface, while seemingly abundant, are actually somewhat ephemeral and hard to get. While certain seeds actually “want” certain birds to harvest them (the seeds may benefit through dispersal) the fish are not likely to volunteer to be dragged high into a pine tree and fed to a baby eagle. So, fish eating birds may experience more competition with each other and be more limited in number in a given habitat.

So maybe birding is all about making lists of species you see (I would argue not, but for many this is at least part of it). Well, competition for things like food and nesting sites shapes our list of observed species.

At a larger scale, the very existence of more or fewer species in a region on a continent matters and can be explained by scientific inquiry. Why do we have one species of hummingbird here in Minnesota, but far more in Northern Mexico or southern California? Going back to the fish eating raptors vs. the seed eaters, consider this: We have two species of nuthatch and the chickadee, all pretty closely related, searching for seeds, but only the bald eagle eating fish, under our watchful eyes at the cabin. But at the larger scale, there are many many more species of seed eating “little brown birds” but the list of species of large fish eating raptor, as we look farther afield, grows very slowly. Furthemore, as we expand our territory of investigation, the large fish eating raptor species list grows in large part by adding species that are not really different species, in a sense. Across most of North America, we have the Bald Eagle. When we include Iceland and Greenland we can add the fish eating raptor known as the ern. What is an ern? Well, its a bald eagle with a slightly different distribution of coloration. When we go further east and include Europe, we get the fish eagle. What is a fish eagle? Well, its a bald eagle with slightly different coloration…

What this means is that I can observe the birds eating the seeds off the feeder on the dead birch tree and think about the concept of species radiation and co-evolution of plants and animals; I can observe the eagle soaring over the bay and think about the concept of ring species; and, not yet mentioned but related, I can observe the four species of ‘woodpecker’ that we’ll see or hear on a given day and think about the concept of adaptive convergence (there are ‘woodpeckers’ across the world, doing essentially the same thing, but some of them are not even birds!)

Here is a handful of other questions that arise from basic observation, each leading to a potentially rich investigation of scientific writing on birds:

• Why do the males and females look so different in some species of birds, but identical in others?
• Why are seed eaters small and fish eaters big?
• Why is it that when a pair of hairy woodpeckers comes to the suet on my feeder only the male takes the suet directly, but every other bite he takes, he passes on to the female, who waits inches away?
• Why does the pair of loons have one or two (or zero) offspring a year and avoid nesting anywhere near any other loons, while the mergansers each have at least a half dozen offspring, and often travel in groups with multiple parents of multiple chicks?
• How can the presence of eagles, terns, gulls, loons, osprey and kingfishers not affect the walleye fishery in these northern lakes, but the presence of cormorants have such a negative effect on that species of fish?
• What is that dog doing swimming after a pair of Canada geese and their young? OMG, gotta go… stay tuned, we’ll get to all these topics and more. Eventually.