Now there’s a sign you won’t see decorating someone’s living room. Their bathroom, maybe. Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World takes a look at the way animals shape ecosystems. It begins with the absolutely fascinating study of Surtsey, a volcanic island that was created in 1968 and which has allowed scientists to follow the development of an ecosystem ex nihilo, and then moves into some particular case studies across the world. Although there’s no limit to the number of potential books detailing the way animals are active ‘shapers of our world’, Roman focuses on dining, defecating, and dying. Taking center stage is poop — or ‘animal subsidies’, if you like. Poop not only serves to spread plant seeds around (and provide an initial bank of nutriment), but to shuffle the chemicals within across wide landscapes, as do animal deaths to smaller degree — except in the case of whale falls. Easily for me the most interesting part of the book was the fascinating history of Surtsey, which was born (happily) in an era where people could appreciate its unique promise, and guard it accordingly. Roman details the way an ecosystem slowly developed on the newly minted piece of terra firma, using it to highlight how important poop (from birds, mostly) is at providing minerals to seeds that found their way to the island; over the decades, the ecosystem has grown in complexity. From here we examine the way salmon runs enrich the trees along the rivers they use, thanks to the fact that bears are incredibly sloppy and wasteful eaters, and dive into the ‘whale pump’, the way whales continually move nutrients between the upper layers of the ocean and its depths. The book ends with cicadas and otters; a population of the latter was moved from an area of Alaska that DC wanted to nuke (and did, because DC is terrible) to a bay that had once had otters but lost them to the fur trade. Eat, Poop, Die is a quick, easy read with no shortage of interest.

Related:
Ghosts of Evolution, Connie Barlow. One of my favorite science books ever, this one looks at what happens to species whose ecological partners have gone extinct — like trees who made fruit for ground sloths, but which now struggle to find a way to spread their seed.
The Origin of Feces, David Waltner-Toews. I have to stop misplacing this book and read it. On the ecological importance of poop.