Living Deserts of Southern Africa, by Barry Lovegrove

Living Deserts of Southern Africa, by Barry Lovegrove. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Struik Nature. Cape Town, South Africa 2021. ISBN 9781775847045 / ISBN 978-1-77-584704-5

Living Deserts of Southern Africa, by Barry Lovegrove: Twenty-eight years have passed since Fernwood Press published the first edition of The Living Deserts of Southern Africa in 1993.

Preface to Living Deserts of Southern Africa

I was young and unemployed when I wrote The Living Deserts of Southern Africa, and my head was stuffed with the science behind how animals and plants have adapted to living in arid and desolate regions - a passion I wished to share with others who love deserts. Now I am older, wiser, retired, but no less fascinated by the remarkable deserts in our region. As the first edition relied on design and printing technologies that are now dated, I was faced with the daunting task of starting from scratch, recreating the text and all the visual components that made up the earlier book - about 500 photographs, maps and diagrams. Understandably, I delayed this quest - very pleasant, as it turned out - until retirement. I undertook four photographic field trips in 2019 and 2020 and, wherever I travelled, in Namaqualand, the Kalahari and the Karoo, I was humbled to learn that in the intervening years Living Deserts had become the holy writ for many: tourist guides, reserve management staff, researchers, students and others. So, it gives me enormous pleasure to be able to offer a revised edition to those who have utilised and enjoyed my book for so long, and to those who have yet to discover the deserts of southern Africa. Today I understand adaptations to desert environments in plants and animals so much better than before because our way of studying the subject has changed significantly during this time. When I wrote the first edition, I called myself an ecophysiologist - someone who studies animals' physiological adaptations to their environment. Physiologists are drawn to deserts, for it is in deserts more than any other terrestrial habitat that plants and animals suffer the most and endure the harshest physical conditions. It is in them that the most interesting and predominantly physiological adaptations occur. But then I discovered that the term adaptation' was being severely abused. In the 1980s, and even before then, adaptation was the explanation given for every little trait difference between species in different habitats - an approach that the famous, and controversial, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called the Adaptationist Programme'. The question that gave rise to a new discourse, advocated by the population geneticist Joseph Felsenstein, was this: how much of the value of the trait that is being claimed to be adaptive is truly adaptive, and how much has been inherited unchanged from its ancestor? For a trait to be considered adaptive, its value would need to be different - to have evolved - from that of its common ancestor, indicating that the species had adapted to the modern environment. In the case of an inherited trait, its value might indeed have been adaptive in the common ancestor, long ago, but it is not necessarily adaptive in the descendant if the trait remains unchanged. [...]

Barry Lovegrove is professor emeritus at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is an evolutionary physiologist, specialising in the diversity of metabolic adaptations in birds and mammals. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cape Town in 1987, undertook post doctoral studies at universities in both America and Germany and is a National Research Foundation A rated scientist. He is also the author of Fires of Life: Endothermy in Birds and Mammals (Yale University Press). In 2017 he gave the prestigious Irving Scholander Memorial Lecture in Fairbanks, Alaska.

This is an excerpt from Living Deserts of Southern Africa, by Barry Lovegrove.

Title: Living Deserts of Southern Africa
Author: Barry Lovegrove
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Struik Nature
Cape Town, South Africa 2021
ISBN 9781775847045 / ISBN 978-1-77-584704-5
Hardcover, 22 x 27 cm, 296 pages, throughout colour photos, images and maps