Book Description
Yellowstone National Park is one of the world's truly extraordinary places. Its landscape, dominated by a great volcanic caldera and sculpted over millennia by water and glacial ice, is host to a dramatically complex flora and fauna. But there is more to Yellowstone's wonders than meets the eye. A nearly unexplored world awaits the curious in the park's streams and lakes, wetlands and beaver ponds, hot springs and geysers. This is the world of microbes--the bacteria, algae, diatoms, and other microscopic organisms that live at the very foundation of the Yellowstone ecosystem.

This book takes readers on a spectacular and colorful tour of Yellowstone's microbial flora and fauna. Photographed using state-of-art technology, each microbe pictured in the book is presented together with photographs of the environment in which the organism is found. Readers will discover the amazing heat-tolerant bacteria that color many of the park's scalding hot springs, the microbes that allow a bison to digest grass, algae that thrive in acid, and microbial mats in every color of the rainbow. An eye-opener for adults and fascinating fun for kids, Yellowstone under the Microscope is a unique approach to the natural history of America's greatest national park.


From the Back Cover
Yellowstone National Park is one of the world's truly extraordinary places. Its landscape, dominated by a great volcanic caldera and sculpted over millennia by water and glacial ice, is host to a dramatically complex flora and fauna. But there is more to Yellowstone's wonders than meets the eye. A nearly unexplored world awaits the curious in the park's streams and lakes, wetlands and beaver ponds, hot springs and geysers. This is the world of microbes--the bacteria, algae, diatoms, and other microscopic organisms that live at the very foundation of the Yellowstone ecosystem.

This book takes the reader on a spectacular and colorful tour of Yellowstone's microbial flora and fauna. Photographed using state-of-art technology, each microbe pictured in the book is presented together with photographs of the environment in which the organism is found. The reader will discover the amazing heat-tolerant bacteria that color many of the park's scalding hot springs, the microbes that allow a bison to digest grass, algae that thrive in acid, and microbial mats in every color of the rainbow. An eye-opener for adults and fascinating fun for kids, Yellowstone under the Microscope is a unique approach to the natural history of America's greatest national park.


About the Author
Kathy B. Sheehan is a Research Associate in the Department of Microbiology and the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University, where she is supported by a National Science Foundation Microbial Observatory grant to study organisms in Nymph Creek, Yellowstone National Park. She also is funded by the National Park Service to survey thermal sites in Yellowstone for the presence of pathogenic amoebae. She has extensive field experience and has led many educational field trips in the park.

David J. Patterson is Professor of Biology at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, and Adjunct Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Dr. Patterson has a distinguished career as a protistologist and is an expert microscopist. He has helped to develop, in conjunction with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the NASA Astrobiology Institute, an internationally known website for the study of microorganisms, http://www.mbl.edu/baypaul/microscope/general/page_01.htm.

Brett Leigh Dicks is an Australian landscape photographer who currently is a Senior Laboratory Technician at Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara, California, and has an extensive background in the highly specialized field of scientific photography. His images have been reproduced in many scientific publications.

Joan M. Henson is Professor of Microbiology and a principal scientist at the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University in Bozeman.

FROM THE PUBLISHER