AuthorMoney, N.P.
Year2014
TitleThe amoeba in the room: lives of the microbes
ISBN978-0-1999-4131-5
TypeBook/Report
Source240pp, Oxford University Press
Review (by )

Buglife claims to be "saving the small things that run the planet". A laudable goal but the real small things that run the planet are far smaller than Buglife’s insects and invertebrates, and largely ignored by conservation and textbook biology.

For example, the Amazon rainforest makes only a small contribution to breathable air (and isn’t a carbon sink - although it does contain a lot of locked up carbon, this isn’t increasing). Money tells us about the provider of half oxygen that you breathe - an organism you’ve never heard of - Prochlorococcus. This photosynthetic marine cyanobacterium is 0.3µm long; too small to be seen with a light microscope.

The book is a polemic against the self-serving sizism that continues to dominate biology.

Website urlukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199665938.do

Notes & PurposeStatusTaxonEnglishClassification
CurrentBIOTAliving things
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