The hidden universe Adventures in biodiversity

Alexandre Antonelli, 1978-

Book - 2022

"An unforgettable exploration of the natural world and the concept of biodiversity-- what it is, why it matters, and how we as individuals can work to preserve it."--Book jacket.

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Subjects
Published
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Alexandre Antonelli, 1978- (author)
Item Description
Includes glossary.
"First published in the United Kingdom by Witness Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing/Penguin Random House UK, 2022"--Title page verso.
Physical Description
xi, 276 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [223]-264) and index.
ISBN
9780226821870
  • Preface
  • Setting the Scene: Two Universes
  • How many species?
  • Unveiling the 'dark matter' of life
  • Life in peril
  • Part 1. Biodiversity: More than Meets the Eye
  • Chapter 1. Species
  • Chapter 2. Genes
  • Chapter 3. Evolution
  • Chapter 4. Functions
  • Chapter 5. Ecosystems
  • Part 2. The Values of Biodiversity
  • Chapter 6. For Us
  • Chapter 7. For Nature
  • Chapter 8. For Itself
  • Part 3. The Threats to Biodiversity
  • Chapter 9. Habitat Loss
  • Chapter 10. Exploitation
  • Chapter 11. Climate Change
  • Chapter 12. Other Hazards and Dangers
  • Part 4. Saving Biodiversity
  • Chapter 13. Large-Scale Solutions
  • Chapter 14. What Can We Do?
  • Epilogue: Looking Ahead
  • Acknowledgements
  • Glossary
  • Further reading
  • Picture credits
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

Antonelli (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Univ. of Gothenburg; Univ. of Oxford) describes himself as a serious scientist writing a popular book--and this he does with emotion. He provides personal background in a preface, from growing up in Bolivia to meeting his wife as a scuba enthusiast and settling down to study in Sweden, where he eventually founded his own eponymous lab. Antonelli is indeed a man for all seasons with a passionate love for the world and its many inhabitants. His accessible writing aims to share that love with readers. Comparing taxonomic description of the natural world to astronomical discovery, he conveys the truly galactic scale of biodiversity (a "hidden universe") before introducing the impending threat of its loss through mass extinction due to habitat loss, exploitation, and waste. Early chapters make DNA sequencing as understandable as seeing through a telescope. Later chapters suggest practical responses to the inexorable progress of climate change: selecting certain woods and rejecting others for furniture and housing; dealing with invasive species and reversing the trend toward monoculture; exercising care in the use of chemicals, many used in household cleaning. Finally Antonelli describes how he and his family have adapted, to provide encouragement to readers convinced by this narrative that biodiversity is really worth saving. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Francis W. Yow, emeritus, Kenyon College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

The myriad forms of life on Earth and the ecosystems that sustain them are simultaneously magnificent and menaced. Botanist Antonelli fervently addresses the importance, endangerment, and necessary preservation of biodiversity. "We are now living in a biodiversity and climate emergency," he warns. Already, the populations of insects and birds are plummeting. The largest threats to biodiversity include natural habitat loss, mistreatment of species, climate change, and pollution. But human greed and an increasing requirement for more food production also play major roles. Forests, wetlands, savannas, and coral reefs around the globe are undergoing metamorphosis and deterioration. Readers learn that the majority of species live in the tropics; bats host an estimated 5,000 types of coronaviruses, but mammals and birds harbor more than 1.5-million different kinds of viruses. About 90-percent of human caloric intake derives from only 15 crop plants. Among Antonelli's suggestions for helping protect nature is to replace lawns with native plants. "In most cases, what is good for nature is also good for us," Antonelli concludes. A brief, understandable introduction to biodiversity and why it matters so much.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"If we are to care for biodiversity, we first need to fully understand what it is," writes Antonelli, director of science at England's Royal Botanic Gardens, in his impassioned debut. Through research and globe-trotting anecdotes, Antonelli seeks to answer "big questions about the origins and evolution of whole ecosystems… and how biodiversity has changed, and continues to change." His survey is divided into four parts: the first defines what biodiversity is (it consists of five concepts: "species diversity, genetic diversity, evolutionary diversity, functional diversity, and ecosystem diversity"), and the second explains why it matters (among other reasons, allowing for pollinated crops and clean water). Elsewhere, Antonelli "outline the major threats affecting biodiversity today," which include habitat loss and climate change, and he wraps up with ideas for protecting biodiversity, calling for up to 40% of Earth's "terrestrial areas" to be conservation spaces and for readers to cut back big time on their meat consumption. Along the way, the author gives readers glimpses into ecosystems teeming with diverse life, and while he uses a fair bit of technical language, he's skilled at translating it for the lay reader. This timely appreciation of Earth's varied life forms delivers. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Biogeography expert and botanist Antonelli (dir. of science, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) presents an easily understood primer on biodiversity. After explaining the five facets of biodiversity--species, genes, evolution, functions, and ecosystems--he offers the reasons biodiversity is important for humans, the health of ecosystems, and the innate rights of species to exist. He also details various threats to biodiversity: habitat loss, exploitation, climate change, invasive species, pollution, and new diseases. Antonelli concludes with how governments, businesses, and the general public can help preserve biodiversity--for example, eating less meat, walking, biking, and buying less stuff can all help. There is also an extensive list of works for further reading. VERDICT Readers interested in biodiversity, the environment, or ecology will enjoy this fascinating work. Readers advisory: for accounts of current innovative projects underway to preserve or restore biodiversity, check out Kinari Webb's Guardians of the Trees and Hannah Lewis's Mini-Forest Revolution.--Sue O'Brien

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Over a century ago, when a 30-year-old Edwin Hubble was offered a job at the Mount Wilson Observatory outside Los Angeles, he was given an opportunity that must have made all his fellow astronomers exceedingly jealous: to handle the most powerful telescope then built. One night, when he directed it towards a hazy patch of sky called the Andromeda Nebula, he made an astonishing discovery - what most people had assumed to be gas and dust was, in fact, an entirely distinct galaxy which Hubble estimated to be almost a million light years away from us. Until then, astronomers thought that everything we could see belonged to our own Milky Way, which was synonymous with the known universe. Hubble's discovery built on the knowledge and dedicated work of many others before him, who had been equally keen to explain and measure what they saw in the skies. Some of them remain unsung heroes of science, like Henrietta Leavitt, whose mere gender excluded her from all due recognition among the exclusively male astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory where she started work in 1893. It was Leavitt who discovered a way to confidently measure the distance to stellar objects far away - an insight which allowed Hubble's estimation of the observable universe. In the years that followed, Hubble went on to map dozens of other galaxies outside our own. In 1990, space exploration was boosted again by a space telescope which, perhaps not surprisingly, was named in Hubble's honor. It showed us in clear, colorful images that the universe is immensely larger and more astonishing than anyone could ever have imagined. Today, astronomists think there are a staggering 200 billion galaxies and one billion trillion stars in the observable universe. To put that in perspective, if every star was the size of a pea, you could cover the entire Earth with a two-kilometer-thick layer of peas. We have no idea how many planets there are, but since the existence of the first exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system) was confirmed in 1995, we have found over 4,300 and counting. On planet Earth, biodiversity - the variety of life - is our 'hidden universe.' Its components are far more abundant, numerous, complex and interwoven than most people may realize. In Africa, our ancestors began to explore biodiversity very early on in our evolutionary history and were guided by the most basic needs of food, shelter and comfort. For hundreds of thousands of years, they tasted most things they came across. They used their senses to explore the plants growing around them and observed what other animals ate. They discovered that some plants had edible roots, but the leaves would make them sick, some plants produced sweet juicy fruits while others were bitter, and some plants were best avoided at all costs. They gradually increased their diet to include many different parts of plants, fungi, mammals, birds, fish, insects and spiders. They learned which trees provided the best wood for making fires, which animals had the best fur for keeping them warm, and which fruits were most delicious. As our human ancestors left eastern Africa and reached other parts of the world, they made new discoveries. On every continent, the exploration of nature began immediately after their arrival. There was often abundant prey, but they had to learn how to hunt it, or satisfy themselves by scavenging on carcasses. They gathered many different sorts of nuts and berries. In some places, animals were easier to catch but fewer in number, like in the Indonesian island of Flores. The island is so tiny and food resources so limited that, when our human relatives arrived there about a million years ago, natural selection consistently benefited small individuals, leading to the evolution of a separate species. An adult Homo floresiensis was only about a meter tall (3.3 feet), which is shorter than most humans with dwarfism today and about the same size as the island's own species of dwarf elephant. In the Levant, another relative of ours, Homo erectus - which inhabited many parts of Africa and Eurasia for some 1.5 million years - relied on elephants, hippos, rhinos and other large animals as a source of a fat-rich diet. As the brain size and cognitive abilities of our ancestors increased, they became increasingly better at developing tools for hunting and processing plants and animals. The development of thousands of local languages allowed them to communicate what they had discovered about the species around them and their uses. In China, archaeological evidence for herbal medicines began some 8,000 years ago. By 4,000 years ago, the Sumerians had left written accounts demonstrating their use of plants like cumin, mint and liquorice. There's scientific debate on this topic, so it may be wisest not to include this as it is only tangential information. While most information associated with species was passed around by word of mouth, the Greeks attempted to synthesize all knowledge available at the time. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle wrote down everything that was known to him about animals. Shortly after that, his apprentice Theophrastus did the same, but focusing on plants. Knowledge about species continued to grow, and discoveries piled up. Farmers experimented with ever more species, which increased the nutritional value of our diet and the range of climates and regions in which we could grow food. Traditional Chinese medicine - characterized by the prescription of many different plants and animals to treat all sorts of ailments - became increasingly popular across much of eastern Asia. However, by the time western societies entered the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, things had got messy. No comprehensive summaries of plant and animal knowledge had been written in Europe for almost 2,000 years, and people from different countries struggled to communicate their knowledge about species. Even when they could use the same language - usually Latin, among scientists - they didn't have a standardized way to name species. The dog rose - a common wild rose in Europe, whose fruits can be turned into a nutritious soup if you dry them and remove the hairy seeds - would be called Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina by one person and Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro by another. Not only was it a burden to learn all the different names a species could have, but also those names were often long and awkward. Misunderstandings were common and could be disastrous. In the carrot family, for instance, some of our best foods and spices - including carrots, celery, anise, coriander and parsley - could easily be confused with some of the most poisonous wild plants known, due to their similar flowers and leaves. The person who brought order to chaos was the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. As a child, growing up in the countryside among farm animals and a rich wild flora, Linnaeus was already collecting and asking his father for help in naming everything he found - from flowers to insects and fish. He traveled the country on horseback, gathering specimens and detailing notes of every species he saw. In 1735, aged just 28, Linnaeus published the first edition of his Systema Naturæ ('System of Nature'), where he proposed a strictly hierarchical classification of all living things. Like the traditional Russian Matryoshka dolls, each category was contained within slightly bigger ones: species were grouped into genera, which were grouped into families, orders, classes and, finally, kingdoms. Applying this classification system, he was the first scientist to document, for instance, that whales and dolphins are more closely related to land mammals such as pigs, than to fish like tuna, despite their very different appearance and behavior. Perhaps most importantly of all, Linnaeus proposed that every species ought to be given a single binary name: Felis catus for the domestic cat, Falco peregrinus for the peregrine falcon, and Rosa canina for the rose mentioned above. His naming and classification system was so simple and useful that it came as a relief to many, and, with many refinements, it has survived to this day.   Excerpted from The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity by Alexandre Antonelli All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.