Why read Metazoan Life without Oxygen?

Book cover of Metazoan Life without Oxygen

Book description

Many multicellular animals do not require oxygen to live but respire anaerobically. Some of these have adapted to "hostile" environments, such as sulphide rich habitats, others live as parasites within host organisms, while others still can perhaps be said to look back on the early days of life on earth…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Metazoan Life without Oxygen as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Neil W. Blackstone

Author

Oxygen is critical to life as we know it, yet for much of the history of life oxygen was scarce to non-existent, and this continues to be the case in some modern environments.

While anaerobiosis is only a minor inconvenience to many microorganisms, what about complex multicellular organisms such as animals (aka metazoans)? Beginning with aspects of the physical chemistry of oxygen, this volume fills in the fairly stereotypical ways that animals cope with oxygen limitation, both temporally and spatially.

Notably, many animals have a much more sophisticated anaerobic metabolism than human beings.

From Neil's list on bioenergetics or how life makes a living.