Ecology is characterized by a rapidly growing complexity and diversity of facts, aspects, examples, and observations. What is badly needed is the development of common patterns, of rules that, as in other sciences such as physics, can more generally explain the increasing complexity and variability we observe. Tom White, being one of the "seniors" in ecology, makes such an attempt in his book. the pattern he shows and explains with numerous examples from the entire animal kingdom is a universal hunger for nitrogen, a misery that drives the ecology of all organisms. He advocates that the awareness of this fundamental role that the limitation of nitrogen plays in the ecology of all organisms should be as a much part of each ecologis's intellectual equipment as is the awareness of the fact of evolution by means of natural selection. His claim is that not "enery" but "nitrogen" is the most limited "currency" in the animal world for the production and growth of their young.

I: The Inadequate Environment

1. The Environment of All Organisms Is Inadequate
2. Plants as Food for Herbivores
II: Herbivores in an Inadequate Environment
3. Insects
4. Crustaceans
5. Molluscs
6. Mammals
7. Birds
8. Reptiles
9. Fish
III: Survival in an Inadequate Environment
10. Strategies to Counter Shortage of Nitrogen
11. Territorial and Social Behaviours
12. Cannibalism
IV: Predators in an Inadequate Environment
13. Vertebrates
14. Invertebrates
V: The Alleviation of an Inadequate Environment: Outbreaks
15. What is an Outbreak
16. The Interaction of Food, Prey, and Predators in Outbreaks
17. Cyclic Outbreaks
18. The Influence of Weather on the Generation of Outbreaks
References.