Darwin's Dreampond : Drama in Lake Victoria by Tijs Goldschmidt - gebrauchtes Buch

Dazzling in their variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, the cichlids (small perch-like fishes) of Lake Victoria, like the finches of the Galapagos Islands and Hawaii's Honeycreepers, have been geographically isolated long enough to undergo unusually broad speciation. These small fish form a species flock—closely related species that have descended from a common ancestor and radiated, or fanned, into different specializations—that is the most spectacular in the world, fascinating anatomists, ecologists, ethologists, and evolutionary biologists alike. The process of speciation was still under way until just recently, when the introduction of the large, predatory Nile perch so disrupted the Lake's intricate ecosystem that the glorious spectrum of cichlids has almost vanished.

Darwin's Dreampond tells the evolutionary story of the extraordinary "furu" and the battlefield leading to extinction. Tijs Goldschmidt skillfully blends a masterful discussion of the principles of neo-Darwinian evolution and speciation with a history of Lake Victoria's ecosystem. The science unfolds in the context of the engaging first-person narrative of Goldschmidt's adventures and misadventures as a field researcher. An astute observer and a clear and witty writer, he warmly portrays the colors and textures of the landscapes and the lives of the local people as he interacts with them during the course of his fi, Lake Victoria in East Africa, succinctly described by the author as a "shallow saucer filled with water, about the size of Switzerland, " is a Darwinian "dreampond" brimming with tropical life. In the 1980s, Goldschmidt, a young Dutch zoologist, was dispatched there to study its fish, specifically the amazingly diverse species of small, perchlike fishes called cichlids. The early years of the project were marked by a series of dizzying discoveries of previously unknown species of cichlid; by the mid-1980s, however, Goldschmidt and his colleagues found the species nearing mass extinction. The introduction of the voraciously predatory Nile perch eliminated 70 percent of the cichlid species by 1990. Originally published in Holland, Goldschmidt's account is vividly colored by the allure of his Tanzanian experience.