The Extended Organism. The Physiology Of Animal-Built Structures

Can the structures that animals build-from the humble burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the Great Barrier Reef-be said to live ? However counterintuitive the idea might first seem, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates in this book that many animals construct and use structures to harness and control the flow of energy from their environment to their own advantage. Building on Richard Dawkins's classic book The Extended Phenotype, Turner shows why drawing the boundary of an organism's physiology at the skin of the animal is arbitrary.