For planters in Britain's steamy Latin American colony of British Guiana, one of life's great irritations has long been the weeds and grass that flourish in Guiana's irrigation and drainage ditches. Until last year, to keep the weeds from choking off the water flow, the ditches had to be cleared expensively by hand labor or chemical herbicide. Then William H. L. Allsopp, a British zoologist at the government fisheries laboratory in Guiana's capital city of Georgetown, took a fresh look at the weed problem. In Britain's Nature, Allsopp unveils his novel solution: the manatee, a clumsy, somewhat seal-like aquatic mammal* that...
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