Biology of Invertebrates

Rating:
Summary: Up to date, but some areas lack depth
Review: I have used this text for an undergraduate invertebrate zoology course. I selected the text for two reasons: 1) the book is current, with a publication year of 2000; and 2) the author made an effort to address not only major phyla but smaller phyla as well.

This is a good book for a one-semester undergraduate course in invertebrate zoology, but if you are looking for anything more, you ought to consider other options, such as books by Ruppert and Barnes, or Brusca and Brusca, or Pearse and Pearse.

Pechenik does a good job in covering the water front of invertebrate diversity, though there are places where depth is somewhat lacking. As I taught my course using this book as the primary reference, I realized that Pechenik is more of an taxonomic lumper than I am. If you are a lumper you will enjoy this book's treatment of various groups (e.g., pentastomida, asteroids and ophiuroids, etc.). If you tend to be a bit more of a splitter, then you will find areas where you are not in line with the text's information.

The supporting illustrations are fine, though I wish there were a few more there. I understand that the author's goal was to produce a shorter book that is still rigorous enough to support college-level courses. He did an admirable job of that, but I found myself looking time and again to other sources for additional information for class.

A good book, but not one that "has it all."

Rating:
Summary: Up to date, but some areas lack depth
Review: I have used this text for an undergraduate invertebrate zoology course. I selected the text for two reasons: 1) the book is current, with a publication year of 2000; and 2) the author made an effort to address not only major phyla but smaller phyla as well.

This is a good book for a one-semester undergraduate course in invertebrate zoology, but if you are looking for anything more, you ought to consider other options, such as books by Ruppert and Barnes, or Brusca and Brusca, or Pearse and Pearse.

Pechenik does a good job in covering the water front of invertebrate diversity, though there are places where depth is somewhat lacking. As I taught my course using this book as the primary reference, I realized that Pechenik is more of an taxonomic lumper than I am. If you are a lumper you will enjoy this book's treatment of various groups (e.g., pentastomida, asteroids and ophiuroids, etc.). If you tend to be a bit more of a splitter, then you will find areas where you are not in line with the text's information.

The supporting illustrations are fine, though I wish there were a few more there. I understand that the author's goal was to produce a shorter book that is still rigorous enough to support college-level courses. He did an admirable job of that, but I found myself looking time and again to other sources for additional information for class.

A good book, but not one that "has it all."

Rating:
Summary: Ok but not great
Review: I took invertebrate zoology as my population/diversity requirement for my biology major and used this book. I thought that it would be easy. It wasn't. Unless you are really interested in worms or insects or crabs then there is a good possibility that you might not really like a class like this and would recommend taking a different population/diversity class instead. The class that I took included both lecture and lab examinations which I thought were rather difficult. It wasn't really my thing and I didn't really find it that thrilling.

The textbook includes the major phyla of the invertebrates: Molluscs, Echinoderms, Arthropods, etc; as well as several minor phyla and a number of invertebrate classes. The photographs are in black and white and there are a number of drawings of the anatomy of invertebrates, as well as many tables and graphs. However, the book is in my opinion a rather slim volume and much information about specific classes are families is largely omitted. Also, the book chooses to first present information about the different classes and orders in a phyla and then presents informations about respiration, digestion, and other bodily processes at the end of the chapter, which I found confusing. It would seem easier to just talk about the processes while discussing the specific classes or orders.

I wouldn't really say that this book is sufficient for the lab portion of a class like this. The drawings are ok and useful for identifying some slides and specimens, but you will probably cover animals in lab that aren't in the book. I used a general biology lab book when I took this class, but included very few slides that we actually looked at, and only about half of the dissections that we preformed. I would recommend buying a specific Invertebrate Zoology lab book, if you can find one.

If you pay attention in lecture and are good at drawing pictures of specimens in lab, then this book is probably suffient for you to do well in an invertebrate class. If you have problems paying attention in lecture and have difficulty telling one worm from another (like I did often) then you might want to check some other books out from the library that go into more detail.