A History Of Life

1. Methane, flatulence, and the coevolution of bacteria
(Past ecosystems/Microbial communities)

The book A Field Guide to Bacteria by Betsey Dexter Dyer features a mine of gold for evolutionary thinking. Easily readable, it does not require the chemical and biological background needed to app

2. What's a mangrove?
(Past ecosystems/Mangrove forest)

...ies or genus level, what hinders the identification of older “mangrove” plants adapted to sea water and their ecosystems (Plaziat et al. 2001). Perhaps one way to come out of the species- and genu...

3. Sperm whales carcasses at the shelf break
(Past ecosystems/Whale-fall communities)

..., Miyazaki, M., Nogi, Y., Yatabe, A. & Okutani, T., 2007, Three-year investigations into sperm whale-fall ecosystems in Japan. Marine Ecology 28, 219-232. Haag, A. 2005. Whale fall. Nature 4...

4. What not to do with a beached whale
(Past ecosystems/Whale-fall communities)

... the benefit of shallow marine necton, benthos and bacteria and of inland scientists interested in whale-fall ecosystems. If you don't know it already, please consider the linked video reporting a...

5. New species of sea anemone at 3000 m
(Past ecosystems/Whale-fall communities)

A new anemone species has been found on whale bones lying on a deep-water bottom, around 3000 m in the Monterey Canyon, Pacific Ocean. The name chosen by Meg Daly and Luciana Gusmao, the specialists

6. Whale-fall bivalves
(Past ecosystems/Whale-fall communities)

The recovery of a varied benthic assemblage associated with a Pliocene balaenid at Orciano Pisano, in Tuscany, shows how shelfal fishes and invertebrates may gather around a whale-carcass following

7. Whale-fall communities on the shelf
(Past ecosystems/Whale-fall communities)

... whale bones and a variety of other invertebrates relying on chemiosymbiotic bacteria for food, shed light on ecosystems based on highly localized, ephemeral sources of food in a vast plain of small o...

8. Past ecosystems
(Section List)

Ecosystems as understood from the fossil record