Reviews for Competition and resource partitioning in temperate ungulate assemblies

The average rating for Competition and resource partitioning in temperate ungulate assemblies based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-23 00:00:00 Dawn Krause I have been utterly captivated by "Civilization and the Limpet" by Martin Wells. It's a book about the author's thoughts and experiences studying invertebrates and it's not a typical science book - it's very conversational and quite funny at times. Limpets are just one of the creatures discussed in the book and guess what?! All limpets start off male. They turn female at a certain age. CRAZY, RIGHT?! (It's called "Protandrous hermaphroditism" in case anyone cares.) There's a ton of interesting info and quotes in this highly engaging book: "The blue-ringed octopus produces a spittle containing a material called tetrodotoxin, which is one of the deadliest nerve poisons known." (p. 46) "Middle C, with a wavelength of five and a half meters underwater, would do fine for locating a submarine, but it is not so hot for finding herrings. High frequency equals shorter wavelength equals better resolution, but it increases attenuation, and decreases the range. Echo intensity drops as the distance squared. A large object at a distance can yield an echo of similar intensity to that or a small object close by." (p. 109) "Physicists hold that, other things being equal, random events will ensure that chaos eventually triumphs. Events inevitably run downhill into heat, and heat dissipates. The universe is doomed to depart with a scarcely audible whisper." (p. 155) "We survivors are more complex than we used to be, still evolving in an environment dedicated to our extermination." (p. 158) "By great good luck, we hit on the octopus at a time in the mid-50's when people were searching for animals less complex than mammals, when attempts to establish the relation between learning and the changes in nerve structure believed to be associated with learning had run into something of a morass. …. A brain does so many things, and learning is just one of them. But if the same patterns turn up in parts of unrelated brains each known to be necessary for learning… there was at least a hope. Besides, the American air force wanted to know how to build tiny computers capable of recognizing patterns and homing in on them (the future cruise missile), and that was just what octopuses were good at. So the American taxpayer paid the bills. (p. 162) "… they (octopuses) are colorblind, but able to recognize the plane of polarization of light (which we cannot); and they live in a geometrically odd world in which a sphere is a flat surface and a rod is a cube." (p. 163) Because I was fascinated by the concept of octopus research driving cold-war-era military innovation, I tried to look up more about those experiments from the 50s, but I got side-tracked by how the octopus has also influenced modern military strategy (a la the Petraeus Doctrine, which mandated decentralized decision making in the field, as well as other things) and counterinsurgent tactics (see the book "Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease"). The book inspired me to write two songs, one of which is called "The Cost of Behavior," which is a chapter title in the book. The second song "Cephalopod" was inspired by Wells' discussion of his adventures with cephalopods, especially with the octopus in particular. The author's thoughts on how science is art is a wonderful end to the book, as well as to this review. "Nobody claims that the arts have to be useful. It is sufficient that they make life more interesting. The notion that science should necessarily be useful is one of the great con jobs of the second half of the twentieth century, perpetrated by governments that realise that science can sometimes prove outrageously expensive." "Animals, like any other exhibition -- and this one is generally for free -- become interesting in proportion to what you already know about the subject, and a part of the job of any zoologist is to help this process along. The fact that he may be getting more fun out of making his contribution than any of his audience is not a reason for supposing his research to be selfish, an ivory-tower activity unrelated to the work, wealth, and happiness of the rest of mankind. A writer, a painter, or a musician is in a very similar position. Some of their products are quite as inaccessible, explorations at least initially of interest only to a few fellow members in the trade. We tolerate, even subsidise, their activities because we believe that they increase the range of experience available to other people. Science is like that, too." (p. 198)

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-19 00:00:00 Robin Crawford This book is written in this man's 70 plus years of life, and if it is not worth reading the work of a person that has had 70 plus years of experience I don't know that is. I found it rather intriguing that another individual cared for other things besides people as much as I do. Though his is life, and mine is form. Though I love life for it represents a form. Further there were good positions on seeking to study things besides ourselves in part they shed answers to our own mysteries, and they allow us to find the technology of life that would benefit us and harness it for as much, or as little as we would like. Though I respect some of his positions and formulations as to life and it's value to other life, and life and it's rights to another species. I still think his view is rather shallow. That may be that I see a change between creatures with very high conscious and awareness and those that do not have such skills or gifts. We are uniquely in the position to help or kill all living species on this planet, as the universe is in that same position with the universe. Their are many arguments in the text that need to be explored though so that we might have a tomorrow not just a today.