MISPLACED ANIMALS: And Other Living Creatures

There have been other books on the introduction of animals and plants into new environments--Roth's Walking Catfish and Other Aliens (1973) is perhaps the first to come to mind. Alice Hopf reaches beyond the familiar incursions of the gypsy moth in America, the rabbit in Australia and the lamprey in the Great Lakes to such comparatively drab travelers as pigeons and rats, and her chapters are packed with detail on each--the species' history, its impact on its new home, attempts to control its spread. The moral--that man ought to consider the ecological consequences of rearranging nature--is admirable, but one wishes that the author had concentrated less on individual examples and more on such general topics as how one species replaces another in a given habitat and the way in which scientists study environments and attempt to control interlopers. An informative if not overly cohesive roundup.