Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.77 AVERAGE
3.77 AVERAGE
Hubbell blends natural history, journalism, and a little personal narrative in the is delightful look at invertebrates.
Waiting for Aphrodite is a beautiful book about the little things that run the world, the small beings without bones that occupied this planet long before we mammals came around. In a delightful, poetic way, Sue Hubbell tells how she took her bike to visit the tidal pools in the park near her house in Maine, and observed sponges and sea urchins, millipedes and earthworms, star fish and sea cucumbers. I particularly loved chapter 12 where she writes about bioluminescence, the capacity of animals and plants to glow and give off light. The last chapter is dedicated to the sea mouse known as Aphrodite, a little scale worm with a furry coat "as resplendent as the plumage of a humming bird" and flaps with which they can paddle and pump to keep fluids flowing within their bodies. This book is an ode to nature and the evolution of life on our planet. Just wonderful.
If you're someone interested in learning about animals, this is the book for you! She is thorough in her explanations about organisms, and was a fun book to read.
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
This was a fun little wander through the world of invertebrates. Hubbell's prose is wonderful (in the "full of wonder" sense of word) and easy to ready while packing in all kinds of scientific knowledge. There's excursions into natural history and the development of our understanding of evolution and taxonomy. There's snippets of geology and of Hubbell's own life. Hubbell guides us through all kinds of invertebrate creatures' biology and mysterious lives as she researches, travels, and discovers them herself. This is a biology class with your favorite, well-traveled English teacher.
One of my favorite chapters (okay, this is actually really hard to choose, but here goes) was the one on bees. At least, this is one that I think has the clearest direct impact on everyday life. Did you know that honeybees are not native to the Americas? There are all kinds of American bees, most of whom pollinate very specific plants in certain regions or seasons and produce no wax or honey for us. Turns out part of the reason we're having such a hard time keeping our bees and pollinating our fields is because honeybees have become the only ones we use, and when kept in unnaturally large populations they become very susceptible to mites, parasites, and diseases. Native bees are often solitary workers, do poorly in colonies, are difficult to transport, etc. Native bees are adapted to a variety of plants in a small area, and we have covered our lands in miles of the same crop, and destroyed habitats (fields, fallen logs, etc.) where they nest. We now also grow probably as many "exotic" plants (for food and otherwise) as we do native ones. Our method of agriculture is increasingly untenable. We may need to not only scale back our fields, but look to pollinators native to the places from which our crops have come. It is worthwhile to point out here that this book came out in 1999. I do not know how many advances or changes in our methods since the research presented in this book, but certainly it has not been enough.
The chapter on fireflies has one of my favorite factoids in the book:
Also the chapter on earthworms. They are just so cool. Making soil! So. much. soil. Did you know Darwin wrote an entire book on earthworms? Now you know. It's called The Formation of Vegetable Mould. Another book that this book leads to is The Biology of Algae and Diverse Other Verses, a 1987 collection of science poetry by phycologist (studier of algae and seaweed) Ralph A. Lewin (some of the verses are quoted in this book and they are delights of rhyme and science). There's a chapter on horseshoe crabs (most the information I already knew 'cause I'm a nerd - but they remain amazing, fascinating creatures). There's a chapter on things in tide pools - like barnacles, mussels, nudibranches (sea slugs), and sea cucumbers. Millipedes, pill bugs, and spiders all get spotlights. I never would have thought I would say sponges (you know, the kind that live in the ocean) are so interesting - and there are so many different kinds! The Aphrodite of the title, as it turns out, is the name of a family of polychaete worms, this particular one a fuzzy iridescent one also known as a sea mouse. Every chapter brings up related questions of how to classify these creatures and how to understand what their function is in their ecosystem. And in the process of understanding functions come up questions like, why should we care? What do non-natives do to the ecosystem? Are some species redundant and okay to loose? What can we do to not destroy the delicate systems we barely understand? Or help them adapt to the changes we bring?
One of my favorite chapters (okay, this is actually really hard to choose, but here goes) was the one on bees. At least, this is one that I think has the clearest direct impact on everyday life. Did you know that honeybees are not native to the Americas? There are all kinds of American bees, most of whom pollinate very specific plants in certain regions or seasons and produce no wax or honey for us. Turns out part of the reason we're having such a hard time keeping our bees and pollinating our fields is because honeybees have become the only ones we use, and when kept in unnaturally large populations they become very susceptible to mites, parasites, and diseases. Native bees are often solitary workers, do poorly in colonies, are difficult to transport, etc. Native bees are adapted to a variety of plants in a small area, and we have covered our lands in miles of the same crop, and destroyed habitats (fields, fallen logs, etc.) where they nest. We now also grow probably as many "exotic" plants (for food and otherwise) as we do native ones. Our method of agriculture is increasingly untenable. We may need to not only scale back our fields, but look to pollinators native to the places from which our crops have come. It is worthwhile to point out here that this book came out in 1999. I do not know how many advances or changes in our methods since the research presented in this book, but certainly it has not been enough.
The chapter on fireflies has one of my favorite factoids in the book:
Humans can glow under special circumstances. The blood of smokers is weakly chemoluminescent, and I read a report in a nineteenth-century text that dying people sometimes shine. Modern researchers have found that several mortal conditions make human blood give off even more light than that of smokers, so that may be what is behind those old reports. But in general we can't produce living light [bioluminescence]. An enormous number of other organisms - plants, animals, bacteria - can, however. Perhaps that is why we are so fascinated by the light.
Also the chapter on earthworms. They are just so cool. Making soil! So. much. soil. Did you know Darwin wrote an entire book on earthworms? Now you know. It's called The Formation of Vegetable Mould. Another book that this book leads to is The Biology of Algae and Diverse Other Verses, a 1987 collection of science poetry by phycologist (studier of algae and seaweed) Ralph A. Lewin (some of the verses are quoted in this book and they are delights of rhyme and science). There's a chapter on horseshoe crabs (most the information I already knew 'cause I'm a nerd - but they remain amazing, fascinating creatures). There's a chapter on things in tide pools - like barnacles, mussels, nudibranches (sea slugs), and sea cucumbers. Millipedes, pill bugs, and spiders all get spotlights. I never would have thought I would say sponges (you know, the kind that live in the ocean) are so interesting - and there are so many different kinds! The Aphrodite of the title, as it turns out, is the name of a family of polychaete worms, this particular one a fuzzy iridescent one also known as a sea mouse. Every chapter brings up related questions of how to classify these creatures and how to understand what their function is in their ecosystem. And in the process of understanding functions come up questions like, why should we care? What do non-natives do to the ecosystem? Are some species redundant and okay to loose? What can we do to not destroy the delicate systems we barely understand? Or help them adapt to the changes we bring?
adventurous
hopeful
informative
lighthearted
slow-paced
I got up to about 3/4 the way through before I put this book down for greener pastures. Who knows...I may finish it one of these days as I usually don't like leaving books unfinished. It's full of information, but I was hoping for more of a A Country Year set in Maine. Instead, very few chapters deal with the creepy-crawlies in Maine--Hubbell travels all over the world to research invertebrates. Of course other interesting issues come up as well such as global warming, evolution, and taxonomy, but I was hoping for more context to her daily life like A Country Year's approach. For those primarily interested in little critters and don't necessarily need a whole lot of other plot to keep it moving, this book is more suited for you. I needed a little more to keep me going. One thing I can say from reading this book that I never would have even considered otherwise: INVERTEBRATES RULE! Strange, but true.
Essays on the creatures of the invertebrate class...camel crickets, sea cucumbers, millipedes, sponges, periwinkles, coral, earthworms, horseshoe crabs, and the elusive sea mouse. Good stuff.