Naturalists' Handbook: Microscopic Life in Sphagnum (Volume 20)

The bogland habitat, which is often threatened by peat extraction, has very great natural history value. As well as the better-known plants, dragonflies and birds, it supports a unique community of microscopic animals and plants inhabiting the leaves and crevices of Sphagnum, the moss that dominates bog vegetation. Under the microscope, a drop of water squeezed from bog moss reveals a wonderful diversity of complex and distinctive organisms.

This book makes that little-known community accessible to the non-specialist. The peculiar characteristics of the bog mass habitat are described, and the book introduces the natural history and ecological interrelationships of the microscopic organisms, focusing in particular on the more obvious and elegant groups: the desmids, doatoms, shelled amoebae and rotifers or wheel animalcules. Identification is assisted by the numerous detailed line illustrations and by the coloured plates. User-friendly keys will help the reader to allocate specimens to a group, and to name the more conspicuous genera of flagellates, desmids, diatoms, shelled amoebae and rotifers, as well as some species of Spaghnum.

References are given to more specialised literature for those who need to go further. There is a provisional list of species known to be associated with bog mosses, but the investigations stimulated by this book are expected to reveal many new associations.

Peter Hayward began his career as a scientific assistant at the Natural History Museum, where he was introduced to his lifelong specialism, marine bryzoa or sea-mats. He read zoology with geology at Reading University, thence to University of Wales, Swansea as research student, gaining PhD in population biology and taxonomy of sea-mats.

He is now a senior lecturer at the university, and authority on bryzoa worldwide from Antarctic to coral reefs. Author with Professor John Ryland of four volumes on marine bryzoa in Linnaean Society Synopses series. Co-ordinator of the popular Collins Pocket Guide to the Seashore, co-editor and contributor to the Handbook of the Marine Fauna of north-west Europe (1995), as well as the Naturalists' Handbooks on seaweed and sandy shore habitats. Zoological editor of Journal of Natural History.