David A. Wharton – författare

We are fascinated by the seemingly impossible places in which organisms can live. There are frogs that freeze solid, worms that dry out and bacteria that survive temperatures over 100˚C. What seems extreme to us is, however, not extreme to these organisms. In this captivating account, the reader is taken on a tour of extreme environments, and shown the remarkable abilities of organisms to survive a range of extreme conditions, such as high and low temperatures and desiccation. This book considers how organisms survive major stresses and what extreme organisms can tell us about the origin of life and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. These organisms have an extreme biology, which involves many aspects of their physiology, ecology and evolution.

General Editor: Peter Calow, Department of Zoology, University of Sheffield, England The main aim of this series will be to illustrate and to explain the way organisms ''make a living'' in nature. At the heart of this - their functional biology - is the way organisms acquire and then make use of resources in metabolism, movement, growth, reproduction, and so on. These processes will form the fundamental framework of all the books in the series. Each book will concentrate on a particular taxon (species, family, class or even phylum) and will bring together information on the form, physiology, ecology and evolutionary biology of the group. The aim will be not only to describe how organisms work, but also to consider why they have come to work in that way. By concentrating on taxa which are well known, it is hoped that the series will not only illustrate the success of selection, but also show the constraints imposed upon it by the physiological, morpho­ logical and developmentallimhations of the groups. Another important feature of the series will be its organismic orientation. Each book will emphasise the importance of functional integration in the day-to-day lives and the evolution of organisms. This is crucial since, though it may be true that organisms can be considered as collections of gene-determined traits, they neverthe­ less interact with their environment as integrated wholes and it is in this context that individual traits have been subjected to natural selection and have evolved.