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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 bacteria’s 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 Dyer’s 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 perception——extremely 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!

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Updated 1st September 2004


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