Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0465005527
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Average Customer Review: 
(From 13 total reviews)
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Customer Reviews
An awesome book! by James Purdy
This book does a great job of explaining the history of many of our common plants and foods, and why they are what they are. It’s a great tool for helping us understand how foods have co-evolved with us and with other species. The story is basic to our understanding of the whole web of life. It’s an awesome and extremely understandable and fascinating book. Buy it!
Ghosts, ghosts, hauntings, ghosts . . . what? by D. E. Hansen
Anachronistic fruiting structures and their traditional, but unfortunately extinct, dispersers makes for a fascinating scientific/natural history topic. Unfortunately, it was Ms. Barlow who tackled this one and in the first 13 pages has made more references to ‘ghosts’ and ‘haunted groves’ than my scientific stomach can retain. To be fair, the first chapter is entitled ‘Ghost Stories’ - what should I have expected?! If I’d read the Table of Contents and skimmed its content, I probably would have recognized the work for what it seems to be - a knock-off parasite of the scholarly paper-back book genre. Who the hell are the Perseus Book Group anyway — certainly not Harvard Press!
The Ghosts of Evolution by Adrian M. Davies
The Ghosts of Evolution is based on some very interesting observations, and the science cited is worth looking into. I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone who is seriously interested in evolutionary theory.
On the downside the book does suffer from the fact that, while the idea is intriguing, it has been spread to thin. It is too long, and too chatty, nevertheless, the basic contention proposed in the book is fascinating enough to make it worth reading
Who mourns for the mastodons? by Dennis Littrell
“The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls…”
–from a poem by Arthur Guiterman
The exciting idea in this book is that there are trees that “lament” the passing of the mastodons and the other extinct megafauna that once distributed their seeds. What animal now regularly eats the avocado whole, swallows the seed and excretes it far from the tree in a steamy, nourishing pile of dung? No such animal exists in the Western Hemisphere to which the avocado is native. (Barlow reports that elephants in Africa, where the avocado has been introduced, eat the avocado and do indeed excrete its pit whole.)
How about the mango with its pulp that adheres so tightly to the rather large pit? As Barlow surmises, such fruits were “designed” for mutualists that would take the fruit whole and let the pit pass through their digestive systems to emerge intact for germination away from the mother tree. Note that the avocado pit is not only too large to pass comfortably through the digestive system of any current native animal of the Americas, but is also highly toxic so that such an animal would have quickly learned not to chew it. Note too that the mango pit is extremely hard, thus encouraging a large animal to swallow it along with the closely adhering pulp rather than try to chew it or spit it out. Consider also the papaya. The fruit are large and soft so that a large animal could easily take one into its mouth and just mash it lightly and swallow. Note too that the fruits of the papaya tree grow not high in the tree, nor is the tree a low lying bush. Instead the tree is taller than a bush but its fruits are clustered at a height supermarket convenient for a large animal to pluck.
Barlow considers a number of other trees, the honey locust and the osage orange, for example, as examples of ecological anachronisms, trees that have out-lived their mutualists and consequently must form new partnerships with other seed distributors or face extinction. For those trees that have pleased humans, the avocado, the mango, the papaya, etc., there is no immediate danger, but some other trees are at the edge of extinction. Their fruits fall to the ground and stay there until they rot. New trees grow only down hill when an occasional flood of water moves their fruit to a new location.
Barlow also sees ghosts from the Mesozoic era. She writes, “Ghosts of dinosaurs are easy to conjure in October and November wherever city landscapers planted ginkgo trees…even when I forget to look for the ghosts of dinosaurs my nose alerts me to their presence. Only a carrion eater could find the odor of fallen ginkgo fruit appealing. Before beginning this book, I wrongly blamed the alcoholic homeless for the vomitlike stench in Washington Square Park.” (p. 12)
In short this book is about those trees–anachronisms–have been without their mutualists since the mass extinction of the megafauna of the Western Hemisphere that took place about 13,000 years ago. It is a popular expansion on some original work done by ethnologist Daniel H. Janzen and paleontologist Paul S. Martin, their seminal paper appearing in the journal Science in 1982. Connie Barlow’s prose is not only very readable, but is full of the excitement of scientific discovery, vivid and concrete, and packed with an amazing amount of information so that not only the trees described, but the giant sloths, mastodons and mammoths–the ghosts of harvests past–come alive on the pages.
What Barlow does more than anything is open our eyes to the ecological nature of fruit and the relationships that exist between trees and the animals that eat the fruit. We learn how color, taste, aroma, texture, nutritional value, toughness of rind, size, shape, number of seeds and how they are encased, etc.–how all these qualities of fruit have evolved to entice the animals that will faithfully distribute the seeds, but also how some qualities discourage other animals, “pulp thieves” or “seed predators,” that benefit from the food provided by the tree, but do not help in its propagation.
The story of the desert gourd was of particular interest to me because during many walks in the chaparral and deserts of California I have come across this vine with its hard, dry and unattractive gourds that were never picked or eaten. Barlow theorizes that the plant is also an anachronism, and that there did exist in the past animals that found the gourds, if not delicious, at least palatable.
Another curious anachronism reported on is the devil’s claw of the Chihuahuan desert of Mexico. This plant produces a most amazing apparatus that wraps itself around an animal’s foot and claw-like clings to the animal, dribbling its seeds to the ground as the animal moves. There is a photo of the claw on page 151 wrapped around a human ankle. Incidentally, the text is enhanced by a number of interesting black and white photos of the trees and their fruits.
This is one of the most interesting and original books on evolution that I have read in recent years, and one of the most informative.
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Tags: co-evolution, mutualism