Adaptation and Natural Selection in Caves

The harsh environment of caves - dark, damp, sparse of food - is home to a variety of bizarre creatures. Biologists, for their part, often treat these delicate, colourless organisms with no eyes, or at least greatly reduced eyes, as mere oddities with little importance to a topic as grand as evolution. Focusing on one cave-dwelling crustacean, Gammarus minus, this book shows that, to the contrary, cave life can provide a valuable empirical model for the study of evolution, particularly adaptation.