Iguana 12.3 b&w text


The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of
Extinctions. David Quammen. 1996. Scriber, New York. 
702 pp. 15 maps, glossary, source notes, bibliography, index.
Clothbound. $32.50 (Touchstone Paperback edition, $20.00).

Move over Gould, Watson, Leopold, Darwin, and Wilson.
The required reading list for biology students, profes-

sionals, and serious nature-lovers has expanded — The Song of
the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by science
journalist David Quammen should definitely be included. The
Song of the Dodo takes the reader on exciting adventures through
the work of island biogeographers and studies of evolution and
extinction. This book is not only educational, but also thrilling
and highly entertaining — and can be enjoyed even by readers
who are not familiar with island biogeography and the study of
evolving species. Well-written and researched, this volume reads
like a travelogue of fascinating animals and places while inspir-
ing the reader to take action to curb habitat destruction and
species extinction.

The Song of the Dodo is organized into ten sections, each of
which covers one issue relevant to the world of island biogeogra-
phy. The author begins with a brief introduction entitled,
“Thirty-Six Persian Throw Rugs,” an analogy he effectively uses
to focus the reader’s attention on the “unraveling of ecosystems.”
He also introduces one of the themes of the book, namely that
most of us are not up to date on the subject of ecosystem decay
and the field of island biogeography. In the following section,
“The Man Who Knew Islands,” the author defines biogeography
(the study of the facts and the patterns of species distribution)
and goes on to use examples of islands like Bali and Lombok to
introduce some of the facts on which biogeographers rely when
they ask questions pertinent to the discipline. In this section, the
author also pays homage to Alfred Russel Wallace and his stud-
ies in the Malay Archipelago and the Amazon Basin. The reader
is pulled into the life of Wallace and travels with him as he devel-
ops his own hypotheses concerning the evolution of species. The
author also takes a look at Charles Darwin and his travels, includ-
ing his famous studies in the Galápagos Islands. Quammen skill-
fully brings to life the quest to form theories and the race to see
who can first publish their hypotheses on the evolution of species.

In the third section, “So Huge a Bignes,” Quammen
addresses the main subject of the book: the relationship between
the evolution and extinction of species. He emphasizes that evo-
lution is best understood while simultaneously examining
extinction by stating that “… the evolution of strange species on
islands is a process that, once illuminated, casts light onto its
dark double, which is the ultimate subject of this book: the
extinction of species in a world that has been hacked into
pieces.” This section of the book provides several examples of
species around the world that have or are rapidly disappearing,
using events leading to declines in the numbers and kinds of tor-
toises to introduce features peculiar to island communities.
These include dispersal ability, size changes, and the loss of
defensive adaptations. In “Rarity Unto Death,” the fourth sec-
tion, Quammen passionately describes the extinction of several
species. Of these, the extinction of the Dodo on the island of
Mauritius is noteworthy. Until humans invaded Mauritius, the
Dodo thrived, living in a balanced ecosystem. With the intro-

204 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2005

Extinctions on Islands:
A Classic Revisited

BOOK REVIEW

B O O K  R E V I E W

Editor’s Note
Although the review of a book first published nearly a decade
ago may seem odd, the subject matter and the readability of
Quammen’s book, combined with its relevance to the conser-
vation and natural history of reptiles, caused me to solicit this
review. I hope it encourages a few more readers to explore
Quammen’s world. R. Powell



IGUANA  •  VOLUME 12, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2005 205BOOK REVIEW

duction by the Portuguese of domestic mammals, the Dodos
quickly expired. On Tasmania, the Thylacine (a hyena-like crea-
ture often called a Tasmanian “wolf”) and the Aborigines both
became extinct shortly after the British arrived. The plight of
Tasmania’s Aborigines provided fuel for Quammen’s thoughts
about the extinction of a human culture.

In “Preston’s Bell,” Quammen takes a close look at the
species-area relationship, emphasizing that “less area harbors fewer
species.” He goes on to tell the story of Frank Preston and how he
came to apply a bell curve to his data on communities of birds and
insects. Preston saw a pattern, biological communities contained
a few very rare species, many fairly abundant species, and a few
species that are very abundant. With this pattern in mind,
Quammen related the story of Preston’s Bell to his own adventures
while searching for Komodo Dragons. The sixth section of the
book, “The Coming Thing,” examines Robert MacArthur and
Edward Wilson’s theories on species reaching equilibrium on
assortments of islands. MacArthur and Wilson hypothesized that,
because new species were continually arriving and old species were
continually becoming extinct, species eventually reach an equilib-
rium. MacArthur and Wilson used a mathematical model to fore-
tell the specifics of equilibrium on any island. A highlight of this
section is Quammen’s personal interview with Wilson, in which
they discussed MacArthur and the impact of their work on the
very fundamentals of population biology.

The seventh section of the volume takes the author to the
world of Tom Lovejoy, “The Hedgehog of the Amazon.”
Quammen examined the SLOSS (single large or several small)
debate and its effect on the creation of the Minimum Critical
Size of Ecosystems Project. The author goes on to suggest that
it might be Tom Lovejoy that needs to be thanked for those
instances where larger natural reserves have been set aside. “The
Song of the Indri” (the largest surviving lemur) shifts
Quammen’s travels and thoughts to Madagascar. Using the ques-
tion: “How rare is too rare?” he extends the thoughts of mini-
mum critical size to the world of population genetics and genetic
drift. Once again, the author beautifully weaves the “soul” of
biology (in this case, the story of the life and death of the guide,
Bedo) into the world of professional science.

“World in Pieces” takes the reader from island ecosystems to
the work of Carl Jones and the Kestrels of Mauritius and the pri-
mate work of Karen Strier in Brazil. Quammen summarizes his
concerns about the patterns seen in these examples and others: “All
over the planet, the distributional maps of imperiled species are
patchy. The patches are winking. In some instances they’re wink-
ing off and on, but in many instances they’re merely winking off.”
In the final section of the book, Quammen takes the reader back
to the travels and thoughts of Wallace. In “Message from Aru,” we
are reminded of the fragility of the natural world and Wallace’s
warning in 1869: “…should civilized man ever reach these distant
lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the
recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so dis-
turb the nicely balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature
as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction” of all too
many species. For Quammen, it comes down to a question: Has
it already happened, or do we still have time?

Readers of The Song of the Dodo will learn much about the
research that has gone into the study of evolution and extinction
— but the book is anything but a dry tome reciting facts, names,
and dates. The author captures you and takes you into the minds
of Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Robert MacArthur, and other
scientists during their quests for new insights. Quammen’s gift is
the story-telling that draws the reader into the events that led to
each of many amazing discoveries. By incorporating exhilarating
stories with educational information, the author painlessly
teaches us the jargon of island biogeography, making this book
an easy read for people who have little background in evolution-
ary biology and may have forgotten most of what they learned in
high-school biology classes.

Although the subject matter is often depressing and the his-
tory of such an arcane discipline as island biogeography hardly
seems appealing, this book is interesting and understandable —
and often as entertaining as a best-selling novel. The occasionally
hilarious, seat-gripping stories of well-known scientists combined
with the depth of information make the book hard to set aside.

Sarah M. Wissmann
University of New England

Biddeford, Maine

and

David A. Wissmann
Avila University

Kansas City, Missouri 

Galápagos Land Iguana (Conolophus subcristatus): two species are cur-
rently recognized, although some data suggest that they are mere geo-
graphic variants and other data provide support for even greater varia-
tion among populations on the various islands of the archipelago. Land
Iguanas were among the species encountered by Charles Darwin dur-
ing his sojourn in the islands. Like many island endemics, they evolved
in an environment largely free of predators and competitors and are
extremely vulnerable to human activities that alter habitats and expose
them to invasive carnivores and to herbivorous mammals that deplete
the vegetation on which they depend.

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