Animals and volcanoes: survival and revival

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511614767.010

Chapter 9 - Animals and volcanoes: survival and revival

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2009

John S. Edwards

Edited by

Joan Marti and

Gerald G. J. Ernst

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John S. Edwards: Affiliation:
Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle WA, USA
Joan Marti: Affiliation:
Institut de Ciències de la Terra 'Jaume Almera', Barcelona
Gerald G. J. Ernst: Affiliation:
Universiteit Gent, Belgium

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Summary

Let's take a positive view. The mountain is an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death: the deluge, the great conflagration (sterminator Vesevo, as the great poet was to say), but also of survival, of human persistence. In this instance, nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate.

Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

Introduction

The vivid memory of a photograph in my grammar-school Latin textbook that showed the body of a dog, cast in a convulsed pose since the Plinian eruption of Vesuvius in antiquity, serves always to remind me that volcanic eruptions can be harmful to the health of animals, ourselves included. It is stating the obvious to allude to the lethal hazards of catastrophic vulcanicity, be they lava, mud or pyroclastic flows, or deep tephra, for living systems. The broader biological interest of vulcanicity is not so much in its lethality as in the statistics of survival and the modes of recolonization in devastated areas. Thus my focus in what follows is on survival and revival of animal communities; survival as a facet of the perennial debate concerning the role of refugia, and revival as part of the little-understood process of primary colonization by animals.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Volcanoes and the Environment , pp. 250 - 272

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511614767.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2005

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