The Hidden Company That Trees Keep
Life from Treetops to Root Tips
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A spectacularly illustrated journey into the intimate communities that native trees share with animals, insects, fungi, and microbes
You can tell a lot about a tree from the company it keeps. James Nardi guides you through the innermost unseen world that trees share with a wondrous array of creatures. With their elaborate immune responses, trees recruit a host of allies as predators and parasites to defend against uninvited advances from organisms that chew on leaves, drain sap, and bore into wood. Microbial life thrives in the hidden spaces of leaf scales, twigs, and bark, while birds, mammals, and insects benefit from the more visible resources trees provide. In return, animals help with pollination, seed dispersal, and recycling of nutrients. The Hidden Company That Trees Keep blends marvelous storytelling with beautiful illustrations and the latest science to reveal how the lives of trees are intertwined with those of their diverse companions.
Features a wealth of richly detailed drawings accompanied by breathtaking images of microscopic landscapes on leaf, bark, and root surfacesIncludes informative fact boxesDraws on new discoveries in biology and natural historyWritten by one of the world’s leading naturalists
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"You can tell a lot about a tree by the company it keeps," contends Nardi (Discoveries in the Garden), a research scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in this scattered volume. Nardi explores how animals and insects interact with and shape the health of trees, describing how beetles pollinate flowers, birds disperse seeds, and parasitic larvae protect trees by debilitating other insects that feast on leaves. Trees are more complex than one might think, he suggests, noting that they have an "elaborate immune system" that emits chemicals to attract wasps and other predatory insects who hunt bugs that eat leaves and wood. Unfortunately, the author spends disappointingly little time examining these kinds of cross-species interactions, instead training the bulk of his attention on profiling dozens of insect species that depend on trees, which will be a slog for anyone who's not an entomologist. Tidbits about, for instance, "leaf mining" caterpillars that eat only the insides of leaves and daddy longlegs that use noxious chemicals to repel predators intermittently intrigue, but they're stranded in a sea of insect descriptions that resembles a field guide, despite not being useful as such because of its unintuitive organizational scheme. This doesn't quite come together.
