In an age of increasing environmental problems, ecology has had to grow up fast from a discipline dealing with relatively simple interactions between species to one that tries to explain changes in global patterns of diversity and richness. The issues are complex. Every species may seem to have its own unique role, but if that is true, then why are there hundreds of species of plankton in an ecosystem with only a handful of niches? The tropics have a high biodiversity, but does anybody know why? And how can a single introduced tree species wreak havoc in Hawaii's rainforests, when it is one of thousands of quietly coexisting tree species in its native continent, South America?
The strength of this book is that it will help digest some of these more complex issues in the ecology of biodiversity. It will do this by zooming out from the local scale to the global scale in a number of steps, marrying community ecology with macroecology, and introducing unexpected nuggets of natural history along the way. The reader will notice that, the larger the scale, the more the familiar niche-concept appears to be overshadowed by exotic fields from fractal and complexity theory. However, scientists differ in opinion on the scale at which niches become irrelevant. These differences of opinion, but also the search for unified ecological theories, will form another force by which the story will be carried along to its conclusion. A conclusion which, surprisingly, seeks to find a glimpse of the globe's future in the traces from its past.

The author (born in 1965) is a Dutch biologist and science writer with a doctorate from Leiden University. In 2001, he published Frogs, Flies and Dandelions, an Oxford University Press trade book on speciation, which was favourably reviewed in Nature and in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and translated into French, Dutch and Greek. The author writes news stories and feature articles on ecology and evolution for New Scientist, Natural History, Science, and various national newspapers in Belgium, the Netherlands and Malaysia. From 2000 to 2006, he was an associate professor in the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Malaysian Borneo. Since 2007, he has been director of research at the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published about 55 scientific papers on tropical ecology, systematics and evolutionary biology, mostly involving land snails and insects.

1;Preface;7 2;Acknowledgements;11 3;Contents;13 4;Life in Little Worlds;15 4.1;1.1 Bottled Biotas;15 4.2;1.2 Not As We Know It;16 4.3;1.3 A Perfect Pitcher;20 5;Leaky Buckets;25 5.1;2.1 The Boxer's Bread Knife;25 5.2;2.2 Counting Calories;27 5.3;2.3 How To Build a Pyramid;30 5.4;2.4 The Flea Hath Smaller Fleas;33 5.5;2.5 This Food Chain Will Self- Destruct;35 6;Hidden Riches;39 6.1;3.1 Specific Issues;39 6.2;3.2 Alice in the Jungle;41 6.3;3.3 Deep Secrets, Intimate Friends;48 7;No Niche Like Home;55 7.1;4.1 There Goes a Badger;55 7.2;4.2 Peaceful Coexistence?;59 7.3;4.3 A Moveable Niche;61 7.4;4.4 Paradox of the Plankton;63 8;Neutral by Nature;69 8.1;5.1 This Fauna Ain't Big Enough for the Two of Us;69 8.2;5.2 Far- Flung Flora and Fauna;72 8.3;5.3 Dying by Random Numbers;78 9;In Splendid Isolation;81 9.1;6.1 A Bug's Life;81 9.2;6.2 The Coffee Table of Science;83 9.3;6.3 Earth Sinks in the Sea;86 9.4;6.4 Chainsaws and Methyl Bromide;88 9.5;6.5 Lubricant Biogeography;91 10;Ecology of Wildcards;95 10.1;7.1 Guild by Association;95 10.2;7.2 Registry of Births and Deaths;99 10.3;7.3 Maintaining Neutrality;101 10.4;7.4 Algebraic Kneejerks;103 10.5;7.5 Pest Control;105 11;The Loom Of Life;111 11.1;8.1 Weft and Warp;111 11.2;8.2 The More the Merrier?;113 11.3;8.3 Six Degrees of Separation;115 11.4;8.4 Top- Down or Bottom- Up?;117 11.5;8.5 The Weakest Link;120 11.6;8.6 Elton Revisited;123 12;The Age of Atropos;129 12.1;9.1 Ecosystems Unravelled;129 12.2;9.2 The Shears of Extinction;130 12.3;9.3 The Awl of Invasion;136 12.4;9.4 The Ecosystem Ripper;142 12.5;9.5 Coda;147 13;Notes;149 14;References;163 15;Index;177