Welcome to this blog!
Exploiters and Exploited is the title of a 20-credit two-term module that Nick and I run for first-year biology students (any anyone else who is interested) at the University of Reading. It is also the title of a book we have written to accompany the module.
Our aim in this course is to introduce biological diversity in an interesting and accessible manner. Thus, we don’t trawl through the many taxa of creatures giving little bits of information, rather we pick 19 (18 in the book) species or groups of species. For each of these we give their history, biology and how they interact with other species, including humans. And this is how the course got its name, as all the species chosen either exploit us, or are exploited by us, and some do both.
In this blog we aim to update and expand the information given in the book, to help both readers of the book and students taking the module.
Paul