I think many people will list "going to Africa to see the great migration of animals" in their list of "X things to do in their lifetime".
Indeed, the documentary saw the brown-yellow land, and the brigade of animals walking through was very shocking.
This is also an important reason for being attracted to this book.
The migration of animals, plants, and humans has been around for a long time, but they tell completely different stories, and what they all have in common is that this is one of the important ways in which life responds to changes in the environment. Yet migration brings about change and panic, which is inevitable and persistent, while at the same time asking questions for researchers in various fields.
The author, Sonia Shah, is a well-known scientific journalist in the United States, who has given more than 1 million lectures on malaria at TED and has been invited to speak at Harvard, Yale and other world-renowned universities to popularize scientific knowledge.
It is precisely because of many years of science popularization work that Shah's works are informative and professional in the fields involved, but at the same time, they are not obscure to read, and their interest is also outstanding. It can be said that as long as you are interested in this topic, there is no obstacle to reading her book.
This study of migration began with butterflies. Ecologist Parmeson published her work on butterflies in 1996, and she found that the checkered butterfly, which is thought to be doomed to extinction due to changes in the ecology, copes with stress by migrating, a persistent phenomenon that spans half of North America.
The paper was published in the journal Nature, and scientists in other fields re-examined their data and found surprising results: both land and sea life are migrating to the North and South Poles, and marine life is moving even faster. The unexpected migration of small butterflies has unveiled the wild migration that has been occurring, which can also be regarded as a "butterfly effect" in migration research.
What about human migration? Panicky. Politicians are worried about the challenges to national security, and experts in various fields have predicted the consequences of crime, disease, economy and other aspects of migration, and even artificially "created" the so-called "crime tide". All these concerns have been dismissed by researchers one by one, and many of the views against immigration claims are untenable, but the adherence to the natural order in the depths of culture has always been difficult to accept.
So in the following chapters, the author continues to review history, telling about the influential writers of order in the field of ecology, the different claims and influences of the schizophrenic and the convergent, the hidden worries of the mestizos, and the retrospective discussion of the origin and flow of animals and plants in ancient times, how humans migrated, and how we should look at and deal with it.
Among them, the suicide migration of lemmings is particularly impressive. Lemmings record the mysterious behavior of lemmings: they gather and move toward the sea, walk on the ice of the ocean, and jump into the water until they sink. Various explanations for such a fantastic phenomenon followed, and some even suggest that this implied the existence of Atlantis, while the dominant view of zoologists is that lemmings "move towards a definite death" due to an overdrawn number of choices for the sake of their fellow citizens. In 1958, the shocking picture was made into the documentary "White Wilderness", which received greater attention for a while, and the lemming mouse became a cultural symbol of self-destruction at that time.
But what is the truth? This documentary is a performance, and all the pictures are done by hand or machine. Biologists have also found that the lemmings that jump into the sea have not really disappeared, but have created narrow crevices under the snow, feeding on moss and continuing to reproduce.
The documentary reflects a popular view at the time that the most appropriate outcome of migration is death. On the contrary, migration is a way to continue to survive change, and many studies have confirmed that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
The only constant is change, in which all species have new opportunities through migration, a natural force rooted in the life and history of all species.