Reviews for The Ecology and evolution of inducible defenses

The average rating for The Ecology and evolution of inducible defenses based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-15 00:00:00 Aman Sidhu This was an unexpected pleasure as I am quite fond of light verse. I was listening to Sue Hubbell's Waiting for Aphrodite, in which she recites several of Lewin's rollicking, sly verses. I immediately rewound the book to listen to "Song of the Winkles" several times: Song of the Winkles I've seen the merry Irish on Saint Patrick's Day parades, And throngs of sorry sophomores a-waiting for their grades; I've seen a herd of buffalo a-chewing of the cud' But I've never seen the wily winkles schooling in the mud. . . Winkles, winkles, wily winkles, schooling in the mud. I've seen the fans a-surging and converging on the gate, And gangs of geese a-gathering, preparing to migrate; I've seen the Holy Rollers rolling wholly on the floor- But I've never seen the winkles in the wrinkles of the shore. . Winkles, winkles, wily winkles, schooling on the shore. I've seen a lot of lemmings milling madly to their graves, And porpoises a-spouting on an outing in the waves; I've seen a troop of hooligans a-fooling in a band- But I've never seen a single winkle schooling on the sand. . . Winkles, winkles, not a winkle schooling in the sand. The ways of little animals are like the ways of men: They go off in one direction, then come trooping back again. The summer's nearly over, boys, so what're we waiting for? Let us join the wily winkles and go schooling on the shore. . . Winkles, winkles, wily winkles, schooling on the shore. Intrigued, I searched the author's name and the title of the verse and as luck would have it the entire thing is online. Pausing in my listening to the Hubbell book, I spent a happy afternoon reading Lewin's verses. Now, in all honesty, I skipped or skimmed over the more esoteric ones and then in the last portion of the book there are some verses on politics and everyday life that didn't do much for me. Still, there are dozens that I relished. Another verse that Hubbell quotes, and I shall too, is "In the Beginning": In the beginning the earth was all wet; We hadn't got life' or ecology' yet. There were lava and rocks' quite a lot of them both- And oceans of nutrient Oparin broth. But then there arose, at the edge of the sea, Where sugars and organic acids were free, A sort of a blob in a kind of a coat' The earliest protero-prokaryote. It grew and divided: it flourished and fed; From puddle to puddle it rapidly spread Until it depleted the ocean's store And nary an acid was found any more. Now, if one considered that terrible trend, One might have predicted that that was the end- But no! In some sunny wee lochan or slough Appeared a new creature' we cannot say how. By some strange transition that nobody knows, A photosynthetical alga arose. It grew and it flourished where nothing had been Till much of the land was a blue shade of green And bubbles of oxygen started to rise. Throughout the world's oceans, and filled up the skies; While, off in the antediluvian mists, Arose a few species with heterocysts Which, by a procedure which no-one can tell, Fixed gaseous nitrogen into the cell. As the gases turned on and the gases turned off, There emerged a respiring young heterotroph. It grew in its turn, and it lived and it throve, Creating fine structure, genetics, and love, And, using its enzymes and oxygen-2, Produced such fine creatures as coli and you. Lewin is particularly fond of riffing on English spelling oddities, as in "The Ptrials of the Ptarmigan": In wintertime, the ptarmigan' As everybody knows' Is blameless as a butterfly And whiter than the snows. He nibbles on the foliage Of willow and of rose, Assimilating nourishment From anything that grows. But in the silly summertime He reels from bar to bar; His plumage darkly mottled And his soul as black as ptar. The ptourist is another bird Of corresponding feather. He flocks in Spring like anything And congregates together. And when the summer time arrives He grabs a handy gun And goes to kill the ptarmigan For supper or for fun. But ultimately, chilling winds Confine him to the house: The ptourist in the winter time Remains at home to grouse. And then the subtle ptarmigan, At ten degrees below, Assumes his pristine charmigan, And, safe from mortal harmigan' Secure from hunt's alarmigan' He flits from farm to farmigan, As white as driven snow." Some of the verses are reminiscent of W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), other of Edward Lear and Ogden Nash. But, let's face it, the biological take is entirely original. The end of the volume notes:"Ralph A. Lewin was educated in England, though he now lives in America and teaches biology and carries on research in various aspects of phycology in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, California. The New Yorker published two of his poems, for which he was paid, and a number of others were published elsewhere, for which he was not paid. (Free verse, so to speak.) He was the co-translator, with Ivy Kellerman Reed, of Winnie-la-Pu, the definitive Esperanto edition of the classic by Milne. "Ralph Lewin died on December 4, 2008 in La Jolla, age 87. R.I.P.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-16 00:00:00 Larry Symons My hubby used to be a chemical ecologist who worked with algae. He won this book at a meeting, so I read it. :) Overall, it is pretty good! I am impressed with anyone who can write a thick book of poetry about algae!