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Why Elephants Have Big Ears: Understanding Patterns of Life on Earth, by Chris Lavers
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Why Elephants Have Big Ears is the result of one man's lifelong quest to understand why the creatures of the earth appear and act as they do. In a wry manner and personal tone, Chris Lavers explores and solves some of nature's most challenging evolutionary mysteries, such as why birds are small and plentiful, why rivers and lakes are dominated by the few remaining large reptiles, why most of the large land-dwellers are mammals, and many more.
- Sales Rank: #2381332 in Books
- Published on: 2001-03-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.62" h x 1.01" w x 7.52" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Amazon.com Review
This book might have been titled On the Perfection of Crocodiles. Chris Lavers, a biogeographer at the University of Nottingham, argues that "After 200 million years of hegemonic ecological success, it is time to recognize crocodilians for what they truly are: perhaps the closest approximation to an unsurpassable ecological design in the entire history of tetrapod life." There's a reason, he shows, that "alligators are as tough as old boots": it's not necessarily better to be warm-blooded. "If the warm-blooded condition were inherently superior in the struggle for life, then the world would be crawling with mammal-like and bird-like creatures, whereas in truth it is quite literally crawling with lizards, frogs, snakes, spiders, and beetles." Lavers looks around the animal world and points out that it's full of large warm-blooded creatures and many, many more small cold-blooded ones.
"There is a natural order to tetrapod life on our planet, rooted in the natural ecological talents of different types of animals," Lavers writes. These natural talents come from the fundamental characteristics of different forms and metabolisms: cold-blooded animals like crocodiles can endure starvation far better than warm-blooded creatures, while warm-blooded ones, if properly fueled, can keep going under conditions that stop crocodiles, well, cold. Biologists are used to thinking that energy balances, costs, and benefits are fundamental issues for living creatures, but not of thinking that these issues can be interesting to the general public. Lavers shows that they can be perfectly fascinating: he writes of the peculiarities of elephants, of hot and cold running dinosaurs, of birds on the wing and the ground, with verve and accuracy. This book might be a particularly good choice for dinosaurophiles who are looking to broaden their interests to even larger patterns of life on Earth. --Mary Ellen Curtin
From Publishers Weekly
In this encyclopedic study of the animal kingdom, Lavers demonstrates the truth in his book's epigraph, taken from the German writer (and scientist) Goethe's diary: "How delightful and magnificent a living thing is! How exactly matched to its condition, how true, how intensely being!" Lavers, a lecturer in natural history at the University of Nottingham (England) and contributor to the New Statesman, shows how form is perfectly matched to function in the animal kingdom. After he explains why elephants have stocky legs and long noses and no hair, it gradually becomes clear why they have such large appendages: with relatively little skin surface in proportion to their volume, they have a hard time releasing body heat; the large ears act as ventilators, providing extra surface for the release of excess heat. Dinosaur enthusiasts will enjoy Lavers's take on the cold-blooded vs. warm-blooded debate, in which the claims of warm-blood champion Robert Bakker and his opponents are evaluated on the basis of a detailed understanding of animal anatomy that many other accounts lack. Lavers also explains the importance of layered jungle ecosystems and inland watersheds for large-scale environmental well-being. The book concludes with a frightening but not alarmist warning about the dangers of global warming, which, Lavers shows, probably caused the monumental extinction of almost all life at the end of the Permian period. The writing tends toward the academic from time to time; a little more whimsical conjecture would have added to the book's already considerable appeal. Why wouldn't we ever see a baby elephant fly? Lavers hydroplanes over the underwater world of fish and marine creatures, but perhaps we can expect a future book devoted to it. The drawings of animals here are outstanding. While it will give teenagers a first-rate introduction to natural history, it holds delights for readers of all ages.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Lavers analyzes why animals look the way they do, why they live where they live, and why their physiology is either warm- or cold-blooded. As a child Lavers watched nature programs and wondered about things that the commentators didn't discuss: Why are elephants' ears so big? Why are reptiles small, with the exception of a few really large species that live in water? Why are most birds small? Understanding all of these whys becomes easy under the author's tutelage. He first tackles the fundamental concept of scaling, which explains why large animals are built differently from small animals (and leads to the answer of the book's title question). He then examines the evolution of animal life and the corollary evolution of warm-bloodedness. The patterns of animal life on the planet can be explained by understanding how their size and physiology interconnect, and then by how size and physiology relate to where an animal lives. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
very informative read if you goofed offg in biology class
By Declan Hayes
Elephants can weigh up to 8 tons; their front teeth can be up to 3 meters in length and can weigh over 200 kg. And the African elephant has the largest earflaps of any animal in history. Lavers explains not only why their huge ears are the key to their curious shape but also to why rats are furry and why King Kong could never have climbed the Empire State Building. The elephant's ears, in case you are wondering, act as radiators, an important consideration if you are a lumbering giant baking under the tropical sun.
There is, Lavers's excellent book explains, method to every apparent anomaly in nature. Gazelles, for example, must be built not only to sprint but to dodge and weave as well. This is because cheetahs, which are renowned sprinters themselves, regard them as little more than mobile larders.
Dogs and wolves, on the other hand, are not great sprinters. Instead, they have great stamina and will wear down their prey by sheer perseversence and, well, doggedness. Lavers also explains such interesting things as why swans glide across the water, whereas vultures hop and ostriches cannot fly at all. He also shows how all of these different attributes go to give us the diversity of life on which we all ultimately depend.
This well written book book also explains why the furs of baby harp seals, mink, lynx, snowshoe hares and Arctic foxes are so much in demand but the pelt of a polar bear is not. Lavers also explains how the cubs of polar bears survive the harsh Arctic winter. Although polar cubs are tiny, blind and wet creatures, lacking in fur, fat and the ability to shiver, yet nature has provided the means for them to survive and become the world's biggest bear in some of the world's most inhospitable terrain. That is but one of Mother Nature's daily miracles that Lavers' book unlocks.
The Arizona based spadefoot toad provides another. It spends most of its life encased in cooling mud, emerging only when it rains to have unbridled sexual orgies, massive food binges, and to lay hosts of eggs. Once satiated and once it has ensured the regeneration of its species, it resubmerges itself in the desert's cooling mud.
The Saharan scimitar-horned oryx is a large antelope around two meters in length, which lives beneath the blazing Sahara sun. It never seeks shelter, it drinks very little water and yet it thrives by the judicious use of deep night time breathing, which generates sufficient moisture for it to live on. When the Indonesian based komodo dragon slashes its prey, its filthy fangs cause all kinds of infections, which eventually wear down the unfortunate deer or human it has ambushed. The dragon then saunters after its weakened prey and dines at its leisure.
Although hippos occasionally decapitate them by rolling them around in their mouths, crocodiles have been the undisputed king of the tropical world's freshwater systems for the last 65 million years. Because they are so perfectly adapted to their environment, the only enemy they must really fear is man, the great destroyer. Because we have introduced such ecological vandals as goats, rabbits, cats, rats and mice to fragile ecological systems like Australia and New Zealand, we have done more damage to the environment than anything else since the dinosaurs became extinct.
As well as being replete with fascinating examples such as these, Lavers' book is particularly recommended because its judicious combination of examples such as with an eminently readable style, shows how our own existence is ultimately entwined with the complex life styles of all of those other vreatures, both great and small.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Splendid and readable
By Dennis Littrell
Chris Lavers is a paleontologist who specializes in wildlife ecology. It is from this point of view that he presents some of the ideas and controversies of current evolutionary theory along with some of the excitement of recent discoveries and understandings in a popular and nontechnical manner. His readable text is aimed precisely at the educated nonspecialist, but without a hint of any dumbing down.
In the title chapter we learn that elephants pump the warm blood from the interior of their bodies to the array of tubes in their ears to dissipate excess body heat. From this consideration Lavers is led to a discussion of whether dinosaurs were warm blooded or not. The evidence he presents makes it clear to this observer that they were, but his cautious conclusion is that the case hasn't been proven quite yet. Lavers hints that the dinosaurs may have to be put in another category, perhaps somewhere between warm blooded and cold, or maybe even somewhere beyond. How about: "I'm hot-blooded, check it and see" (to reprise a rock lyric).
Lavers goes to considerable depth to demonstrate how much we can learn by combining evidence from the fossil record with what we know about the metabolism of animals and how their bodies work. Dinosaur anatomy, for example, strongly suggests a closer kinship with today's avian world than with the reptilian. Furthermore, the large size of many dinosaurs is inconsistent with cold-bloodedness. Reptiles can't get as big as a Brontosaurus because (for one thing) they would not be able to regulate their temperature. Lavers points out that all the really big animals on earth today, with the exception of the giant tortoises, Komodo dragons and some snakes--and they aren't really that big--are warm-blooded. He cites the arguments of Robert Bakker and others to conclude that T. Rex, for example, wouldn't have the metabolic power to run down prey if it were cold-blooded.
I found Lavers's discussion of the difference between non-oxygen-based metabolic reactions capable of "supercharged" bursts of short-lived energy typical of reptiles, and the sustainable aerobic reactions typical of mammals like dogs and humans very interesting. The quick bursts are those of the sprinter who is wasted after at most a few hundred yards, while the aerobic engine sustains the pace of the long distance runner. Also interesting is the material in the chapter "Life on the Edge" about how birds and mammals maintain their body temperatures in the climate extremes of the deserts and the polar regions of the earth. Lavers notes that in very cold places there are no reptiles.
In some of this I am reminded of the famous and splendid essay by J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size," published many decades ago. Lavers presents the same kind of reasoned argument based on physiology and anatomy to demonstrate why animals are built the way they are and why it would be difficult for them to be constructed otherwise. One comes away from the reading with a sense of having learned something important and exciting, a sense of having acquired understanding, not merely a collection of facts.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
interesting and well argued
By spacedog
answers many evolutionary questions and brings up topics you probably hadn't even thought to ask about. incorporates a lot of paleontological evidence and focuses on the evolution of different groups of animals, as well as on specific species. repeatedly refers back to basic laws of physics to explain various adaptations.
readable in general, although sometimes the text is a little awkward and overly detailed and the footnotes could have been better integrated.
here's a complete rundown of the topics covered:
Ch.1: covers issues with the scaling of areas to volumes, how it affects an animal's leg shape, body size, head size, hair, etc.
Ch.2: the energy costs for cold vs. warm-blood, looks more closely at issues w/ body size
Ch.3: looks at theories about the evolution of warm-bloods
Ch.4: looks at theories about whether or not dinosaurs were cold or warm-blooded
Ch.5: adaptations for animals, including in the tundra and desert
Ch.6: why there are hardly any huge cold-bloods, except in unstable, infertile areas like Australia
Ch.7: why there are hardly any large mammals in freshwater regions, although they exist on land and in the ocean. looks at the success of crocodiles.
Ch.8: why there are many species of birds in general and why there aren't many species of large birds
Ch.9: the catastrophic events that happened when there was global warming and decrease of global biodiversity in a previous era
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