Overview

Bogland habitat, which is often threatened by peat extraction, has enormous natural history value. As well as the better-known plants, dragonflies and birds, it supports a unique community of microscopic animals and plants inhabiting the leaves and crevices of Sphagnum, the moss that dominates bog vegetation. Under the microscope, a single drop of water squeezed from bog moss reveals a wonderful diversity of complex and distinctive organisms. The peculiar characteristics of this bog moss habitat are described, and the book introduces the natural history and ecological interrelationships of its microscopic organisms, focusing in particular on the more obvious and elegant groups: the desmids, diatoms, shelled amoebae and rotifers or wheel animalcules. Identification is assisted by numerous detailed line illustrations and by the coloured plates. User-friendly keys will help the reader to allocate specimens to a group, and to name the more conspicuous genera of flagellates, desmids, diatoms, shelled amoebae and rotifers, as well as some species of Sphagnum itself. This is digital reprint of 0855462914 (1993).

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9781784272739

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Peter Hayward began his career as a scientific assistant at the Natural History Museum, where he was introduced to his lifelong specialism, marine bryzoa or sea-mats. He read zoology with geology at Reading University, thence to University of Wales, Swansea as research student, gaining PhD in population biology and taxonomy of sea-mats. He is now a senior lecturer at the university, and authority on bryzoa worldwide from Antarctic to coral reefs. Author with Professor John Ryland of four volumes on marine bryzoa in Linnaean Society Synopses series. Co-ordinator of the popular Collins Pocket Guide to the Seashore, co-editor and contributor to the Handbook of the Marine Fauna of north-west Europe (1995), as well as the Naturalists' Handbooks on seaweed and sandy shore habitats. Zoological editor of Journal of Natural History. 

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