An introduction to copepod diversity
Copepods are small but extremely abundant crustaceans which occur in every type of aquatic habitat. They are amazingly diverse in body form, reflecting their diversity in mode of life and the rapid expansion of taxonomic knowledge concerning copepods has made it difficult for students and non-specialists to access the voluminous, but scattered primary literature. After two and a half centuries of traditional taxonomic endeavour, the most urgent need is for a synthesis, summarising the current state of the art. An Introduction to Copepod Diversity is designed to provide such an overview of the entire group {u2013} from marine plankton to subterranean forms, and from parasites to minute inhabitants of the interstitial spaces between sediment particles. Published in two parts, it provides a family by family account of all copepods, supported by 289 pages of line drawings, adapted from the best available sources and redrawn to a standard format. It will serve as a. platform for the Twenty-first Century taxonomy which must integrate novel sources of information from bar-codes to genomes. Although it is not a phylogenetic work, it will also provide a framework for the assimilation of biodiversity information on copepods into global informatics systems, so that we can better interpret and use available species-level data. Above all, this book is designed to facilitate the identification of copepods, whether you wish to identify an endoparasite from a sea squirt, a member of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent community, or just a common planktonic copepod from your local lake or estuary. An Introduction to Copepod Diversity will enable you to identify to genus-level in the overwhelming majority of cases, and provide you with an entry point into the biological literature
Print Book, English, 2004
Ray Society, Andover, U.K., 2004