Nursery Earth: The Hidden World of Baby Animals and the Amazing Ingenuity of Life (Staaf Danna)(Paperback)

It's time to pay attention to baby animals. From egg to tadpole, chick to fledgling, they offer scientists a window into questions of immense importance: How do genes influence health? Which environmental factors support--or obstruct--life? Entire ecosystems rest on the shoulders (or tentacles, or jointed exoskeletons) of animal babies. At any given moment, babies represent the majority of animal life on Earth.In Nursery Earth, researcher Danna Staaf invites readers into the sibling (and, sometimes, clashing) fields of ecology and developmental biology. The tiny, hidden lives that these scientists study in the lab and in the wild reveal some of nature's strangest workings: A salamander embryo breathes with the help of algae inside its cells. The young grub of a Goliath beetle dwarfs its parents. The spotted beak of a parasitic baby bird tricks adults of other species
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