EDITORIAL REVIEWS
Product Description Air Breathing Fishes: Evolution, Diversity, and Adaptation is unique in its coverage of the evolution of air-breathing, incongruously because it focuses exclusively on fish. This important and fascinating book, containing nine chapters that present the life history, ecology, and physiology of many air-breathing fishes, provides an exceptional overview of air-breathing biology. Each chapter provides a historical background, details the present status of knowledge in the field, and defines the questions needing attention in future research. Thoroughly referenced, containing more than 1,000 citations, and well documented with figures and tables, Air-Breathing Fishes is comprehensive in its coverage and will certainly have wide appeal. Researchers in vertebrate biology, paleontology, ichthyology, vertebrate evolution, natural history, comparative physiology, anatomy and many other fields will find something new and intriguing in Air-Breathing Fishes. Key Features * Offers a complete overview of an important and immensely interesting area of research * Provides a perspective of air-breathing fish that spans 300 million years of vertebrate evolution * Contains numerous illustrations as well as comprehensive charts * Provides a synoptic treatment of all the known air-breathing species with important data on their morphological and physiological adaptations
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 1 review)
Fish lung is quite ancient Although this book is a detailed survey and synthesis of air-breathing fishes, it is clearly written, and provides introductory background information on the subject. As is pointed out several times, while air-breathing fishes are often considered as the fishes which evolved the ability to breathe in the air, and then invaded the land to evolve into the land vertebrates, this is not entirely correct. The fish lung evolved in the ancestor to both the ray-finned fishes and the lobe-finned fishes, many millions of years prior to transition to land. In the Upper Devonian one of many different fishes with lungs, a group belonging the lobe-finned fishes, became amphibious and eventually evolved into the tetrapods. While the fish lung was conserved and exists in the modern lungfish, in the bulk of fishes, such as modern teleosts, the fish lung evolved into a non-respiratory gas bladder, used largely for buoyancy control. Nonetheless, for more than three hundred different species of modern freshwater, shallow fishes, air breathing is a valuable mechanism to cope with hypoxic water conditions, and was conserved or re-evolved. November 27, 2000