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Oar Feet and Opal Teeth is about free-living copepods and the
copepodologists who study them. Copepods are a subclass of the
arthropod class Crustacea. They act as dominant herbivores and
small predators in the planktonic ecosystems of oceans, estuaries,
and lakes. Copepods are likely the largest assemblage of complex
animals on earth. These strikingly beautiful small crustaceans are
of wide ecological significance and as complex and precisely
adapted as insects. Yet few biologists and others interested in
animals are familiar with them. In Oar Feet and Opal Teeth, Charles
B. Miller introduces these small crustaceans and the scientists
devoting their careers to revealing their biology. In twenty-one
chapters, Miller details the defining features and general biology
of copepods. They typically have four or five pairs of oar-like
feet to drive escape jumps. Teeth on mandible extensions are formed
with siliceous minerals akin to opal. The first two chapters of the
book closely examine the oar feet and mouth parts. Subsequent
chapters describe internal anatomy, taxonomy, and many aspects of
copepod natural history. Recent evolutionary insights about them
are reviewed; those are based on molecular genetics and reach back
to the Cambrian explosion. Oar Feet and Opal Teeth includes over
twenty biographical sketches of copepodologists from the
mid-twentieth century to the present. Among them, Russell Hopcroft,
a premier photographer of plankton, has full-color copepod images
featured throughout the book. Jeannette Yen learned how Euchaeta
marina detects prey and studies how ready-for-mating copepods find
each other. Shinichi Uye of Hiroshima University studied the
production by copepods of resting eggs and their delayed
development. Grace Wyngaard is studying the special embryonic
cell-divisions of some lake copepods for eliminating "junk DNA."
Miller based most of the profiles featured in the book on personal
interviews he conducted.
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