Evolutionary Wars: A Three Billion Year Arms Race

657 Pages·1999·6.68 MB·English

by  Charles Kingsley Levy

Evolutionary Wars: A Three-billion-year
title: Arms Race: the Battle of Species On Land,
At Sea, and in the Air
author: Levy, Charles K.
publisher:
isbn10 | asin: 0716734834
print isbn13: 9780716734833
ebook isbn13: 9780585369945
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Page iii
Evolutionary Wars A Three-Billion-Year Arms
Race
The Battle of Species on Land, at Sea, and in the Air
Charles Kingsley Levy
Illustrations by
Trudy Nicholson
Page iv
All illustrations, with the exception of those appearing on pages 5, 15,
50, 66, 68, 104, 125, 148, 170, 199, 212, 215, 224, 226, 239, 246, 249,
269, and 273 are reprinted with permission of Grass Instrument
Division of Astro-Med, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levy, Charles K., 1924-
Evolutionary wars: a three-billion-year arms race: the battle of
species on land, at sea, and in the air/Charles Kingsley Levy;
illustrations by Trudy Nicholson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7167-3483-4 (trade)
1. Natural selection. 2. Predation (Biology) I. Title.
QH375.L54 1999
576.8'2dc21 99-39982
CIP
© 1999 by Charles Kingsley Levy. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical,
photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic
recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or
otherwise copied for public or private use, without written permission
from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
First printing 1999
W. H. Freeman and Company
41 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Houndmills, Basingstoke RG21 6XS, England

Page v
To my wife, June
Page vii
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 1
In the Beginning
2 35
The War at Sea
3 91
The Terrestrial Battleground
4 119
The Vertebrate Landing
5 161
The Wild Blue Yonder
6 209
Eating from the Table of Others
7 235
How Plants and Fungi Make War
8 251
The Ultimate Weapon System
Index 279

Page ix
Preface
As a child growing up in the age before television, when parents read
to children and grandparents told tales that demanded attentive
listening, I was struck by the prevalence in their stories of a theme of
conflict and struggle for survival. In religious school, the stories of
David and Goliath, Samson and the Philistines, and the flight of the
Hebrews from Egypt held my rapt attention. At home, my father, a
Rudyard Kipling buff, read to me from The Jungle Book and the Just
So Stories. I could visualize the man-child Mowgli, raised by wolves,
thwarting the evil tiger, Sher Kahn. Another Kipling tale, about the
brave little mongoose who protected his adopted human family from
the malevolent cobras, Nag and Nagina, was also indelibly imprinted
on my mind. It was the beginning of my lifelong fascination with life's
struggles for survival, competition, and predator-prey interactions.
Like all children, I became fascinated with dinosaurs such as
Tyrannosaurus rex and the monstrous herbivores they hunted. Walt
Disney recognized the universality of our interest and exploited it in
his early full-length cartoon films. Later, Steven Spielberg tapped into
our fascination with evolutionary battles 100 million years old; his
spectacular fantasy Jurassic Park included not only T. rex but also a
pack of swift hunters called velociraptors.
I was fortunate to have a father who was a cartographer and explorer,
and who spent many years in the jungles of Southeast Asia and along
the Alaskan coast all the way to the tip of the Aleutians. At an early
age, I vicariously enjoyed his adventures with huge crocodiles, giant
pythons, and massive grizzly bears. In retrospect, the dimensions of
the animals seemed to increase with the passage of time, so much so
that I began to catalog sizes with each retelling. It seems we humans
are enthralled with largeness, but the reality is that most dinosaurs
were really of quite modest proportions.
Later in life, when I began my studies in biology, whole new
battlegrounds and a vast array of new predators became visible to me
under the lenses of a microscope. Armadas of swift and slow-moving
microorganisms were involved in survival contests. Some seemed to
dart across the field at tremendous veloc-
Page x
ity, but speed is of course only relevant within a given dimension: 30
body lengths in a second for a paramecium is not comparable to the
15 miles per hour of a great white shark. Some of the microscopic
warriors that I watched fired salvos of missiles that immobilized their
prey, while others gave off toxins and other chemical defenses. Still
others used early-warning systems to detect predators and escape.
Indeed, these tiny predators had evolved their extraordinary weapons
systems over 3 billion years ago, and under selection pressure their
prey had evolved a variety of countermeasures to ensure their own
survival. It was in this way that predators and prey coevolved.
The evolutionary selection pressures that pit predators against prey in
an endless struggle are analogous to an arms race, powered by
competition. In this race there is never a clear-cut victor, and
advantages that accrue to either of the contestants are simply
statistical improvements in efficiency comparable to an improved
batting average. A small increase in predator hunting success does not
have significant impact on the prey population, and the development
of antipredator countermeasures has little impact on the predator
population. The agenda for survival of both groups involves a variety
of changes in the total weapon system, which includes not only the
design of the hardware of actual weaponry but also the tactics and
strategies that involve coevolution of both the hunters and the hunted.
The evolutionary processes that improve fitness go far beyond
adaptations involved in killing and eating and defensive strategies to
avoid being eaten. Indeed, predation, in a bizarre way, ensures
improved survival of prey species. It is mutually beneficial, because
predators usually cull out the weak, the old, and the less fit of the prey
species, and in doing so they preserve the dynamic balance of nature.
The environment, or battleground of competition between predator
and prey, has an enormous influence on survival, and in the history of
life on Earth, the environment has undergone dramatic changes. There