I recently purchased the latest edition and have been studying it pretty closely. Its one of the best biology texts I have, good for building a foundation in understanding the structure and function of invertebrate taxa. It is not very heavy on the ecology, but even though I am an ecology grad student I don't really mind. It is more helpful for me to feel like I grasp the basics of what an organism is, before moving on to an explicit focus of how an organism functions in an ecosystem. I own the seventh edition, and from what I read in the introduction, it is a significant revision from the sixth. The classification system has been updated and 5 additional chapters that I am very fond of have been added. These chapters focus on the conceptual significance of thematic changes in organism design - there is a chapter on the eukaryotic cell, on multicellularity, or the eumetazoa and the development muscles and nerves, on bilatera, and one other that I haven't gotten too. The chapter on protozoa (though limited in scope) did quite a lot to impress me that the strange animals like sponges and coral at the base of animal phylogeny are not at all strange when viewed in the context of their protist predecessors.



One thing that bothered me at first about the book was that its all in black and white. Many invertebrates are really spectacular to look at, so my heart was a little heavy when I first flipped through the pages. I suppose this saves them money and makes the book more affordable, but the excellent line diagrams are probably more helpful in learning tissue and organ anatomy, so I've forgiven them. The diagrams are worth half the value of the book - you really need to see the structures you are reading about to understand them.



In short, its a great book, and I recommend it for the more hardnosed, curious type of student and enthusiast.

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