A Field
Guide to Bacteria
by Betsey Dexter Dyer
Cornell University Press, Ithaca &
London, 2003
368 pp., illus. 57 b/w, 120 col. Trade,
$49.95; Paper, $26.00
ISBN: 0-8014-3902-7; ISBN: 0-8014-8854-0.
Reviewed by Kasey Asberry
Human Origins
955 Delano SF CA 94112
kasberry@humanorigins.org
A Field Guide to Bacteria is a
well-designed and inspirational work,
useful for both the experienced field
biologist and the novice researcher. Its
consistent structure allows great depth
and breadth of information without over-burdening
the reader. Curiosity is both stimulated
and rewarded with what for many humans
will be a new world view"bacteriocentric"that
is, an understanding that bacteria are
the most diverse, ancient, enduring, and
influential life form on earth.
When Dyer begins to unveil this vision
by surveying just the classes of subvisible
life, she also reveals close intellectual
ties to her revolutionary friend and teacher
Lynn Margulis, whose far-reaching ideas
(such as in her compelling and poetic
survey "The Garden of Microbial
Delights," as well as her study
of the many forms of microbial reproduction
"Mystery Dance" and her
facilitation of conferences on planetary
astronomy) ground the contemporary microbiological
lens on life.
Like Margulis Dyer employs taxonomy based
upon DNA sequencing rather than more traditional
classification by morphology or metabolism.
Clear indexing, numerous diagrams and
high-quality color plates further clarify
her organization.
A Field Guide to Bacteria provides
both the big picture of bacterias
role in the richness of life and a satisfying
level of detail for all the major taxonomic
groups. All are organized around a principle
common to other field guides, the field
marker. The most powerful idea in Dyers
highly portable book is that the careful
observer can learn to see signs of subvisible
life wherever we look in the form of field
markers. From the presence or absence
of bacterial life we can discern which
minerals and chemical inter-reactions
are in effect or may have been in the
past. These signs provide direct experience
and knowledge of dimensions orders of
magnitude different from everyday human
perceptionextremely tiny,
vast realms where so much life teems that
has direct bearing upon animal life, health,
death, history, and future.
Major sections are devoted to Cyanobacteria,
Gram-Positive & Proteobacteria, Ancient
Hyperthermophiles, Thermophilic Green
Non-Sulfurs and Archaea classes of bacteria.
Each class is provided an overview and
consistent sets of details associated
with their primary subgroups. While pathenogens,
per se, are not treated in this
work, other everyday families of bacteria
are, including those associated with human
food production.
This book made me want to stride around
through Yosemite to visit the cauldrons
of boiling acid mud and travel by submarine
to the sulfurous deep ocean vents where
without light and under extreme pressure
creatures ("Extreme Thermophiles")
thrive in much the same way that they
have for many millions of years. Dyer
provides helpful guidance about how (and
how not) to collect samples in the field
for culture in the lab and further study.
Even for the city-dweller with no microscope,
living with this book under your arm for
a few weeks may fuel the imagination with
a sense of expanded scale and common cause
with creatures who live at extremes of
heat, light, acidity and with such reproductive
and metabolic flexibility that human adaptations
seem stodgy in comparison. Dyer thoroughly
and lovingly invites her readers to consider
that bacteria are us and we are them!