Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Zoology - General

• Presents the fundamentals of environmental planning and methodological material for analysis.
  
• Real world examples are provided to illustrate concepts.
  
• Political, ethical and societal considerations are addressed.
  
• Coverage...

In contrast to previous works which have attempted to integrate ecology and physiology, Physiological Diversity adopts a completely different and more controversial approach in...

This book addresses a simple question: Are animals designed economically? The pronghorn can run at speeds of up to 60 kilometers an hour and can maintain this speed for nearly a full hour. Clearly, the form of this elegant animal is beautifully matched to the function it needs to perform.

This is symmorphosis. The theory of symmorphosis predicts that the size of the parts in a system must be matched to the overall functional demand. Moreover, it predicts that animals must provide their complex systems with a functional capacity that can cope with the highest expected functional...

View a collection of videos on Professor Wilson entitled "On the Relation of Science and the Humanities"

Harvard University Press is proud to announce the re-release of the complete original version of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis--now available in paperback for the first time. When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Although voted by officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior Society the most important book on animal behavior of all time,...

Can a parrot understand complex concepts and mean what it says? Since the early 1900s, most studies on animal-human communication have focused on great apes and a few cetacean species. Birds were rarely used in similar studies on the grounds that they were merely talented mimics--that they were, after all, "birdbrains." Experiments performed primarily on pigeons in Skinner boxes demonstrated capacities inferior to those of mammals; these results were thought to reflect the capacities of all birds, despite evidence suggesting that species such as jays, crows, and parrots might be capable of...

Sibling rivalry and intergenerational conflict are not limited to human beings. Among seals and piglets, storks and burying beetles, in bird nests and beehives, from apples to humans, family conflicts can be deadly serious, determining who will survive and who will perish. When offspring compete for scarce resources, sibling rivalry kicks in automatically. Parents sometime play favorites or even kill their young. In More Than Kin and Less Than Kind, Douglas Mock tells us what scientists have discovered about this disturbing side of family dynamics in the natural world.

Natural...

Animal Cognition presents a clear, concise, and comprehensive overview of what we know about cognitive processes in animals. Focusing mainly on what has been learned from experimental research, Vauclair presents a wide-ranging review of studies of many kinds of animals--bees and wasps, cats and dogs, dolphins and sea otters, pigeons and titmice, baboons, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys, and Japanese macaques. He also offers a novel discussion of the ways Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Piagetian concepts may be used to develop models for the study of animal...

What do such words as "information," "displacement," and "courtship" mean to the growing ranks of ethologists who study animal behavior? Like all sciences, ethology has accumulated its own set of concepts and terms, taken from everyday language, borrowed from neighboring disciplines, or coined especially to describe novel ideas and phenomena. Klaus Immelmann and Colin Beer have responded to the acute need for an authoritative dictionary of ethology with this valuable guide to the world of animal behavior.

The authors present a balance of historical, enduring, and current terminology,...

"An evolutionary event" wrote John Pfeiffer in the New York Times Book Review when Sociobiology was published in 1975, "announcing for all who can hear that we are on the verge of breakthroughs in the effort to understand our place in the scheme of things." Praised by many and damned by some, Sociobiology provided the framework for a new science--the study of the biological basis for social behavior in every species, from the lowliest amoeba colony to modern human society.

In this abridged edition, Edward O. Wilson trims his monumental work to its essential...

A key way that behavioral ecologists develop general theories of animal behavior is by studying one species or a closely related group of species--''model systems''--over a long period. This book brings together some of the field's most respected researchers to describe why they chose their systems, how they integrate theoretical, conceptual, and empirical work, lessons for the practice of the discipline, and potential avenues of future research. Their model systems encompass a wide range of animals and behavioral issues, from dung flies to sticklebacks, dolphins to African wild dogs, from...

Synthesizing studies of parental care in a wide variety of animals, this book is the first attempt to provide general answers to the following important questions: Why does the extent of parental care vary so widely between species? Why do only females care for eggs and young in some animals, only males in others, and both parents in a few? To what extent is parental care adjusted to variation in its benefits to offspring and its costs to parents? How do parents divide their resources between their sons and daughters? In this book separate chapters examine the evolution of variation in egg...

The Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata) is well known to biologists and home aquarium enthusiasts alike. Scientists have studied guppies for most of the twentieth century. Some of the most intensive recent research has been conducted by behavioral ecologists, who have found that the guppy mating system makes guppies especially useful in the study of sexual selection and mate choice. By observing guppy behavior in aquaria, researchers hope to obtain new insights into how selection operates in natural populations. Here Anne Houde summarizes and synthesizes the scientific work done...

Optimization theory is designed to find the best ways of doing things. The structures of animals, their movements, their behavior, and their life histories have all been shaped by the optimizing processes of evolution or of learning by trial and error. In this revised edition of R. McNeill Alexander's widely acclaimed Optima for Animals, we see how extraordinarily diverse branches of biology are illuminated by the powerful methods of optimization theory.

What is the best strength for a bone? Too weak a bone will probably break but an excessively stout one will be...

Although there is extensive literature in the field of behavioral ecology that attempts to explain foraging of individuals, social foraging--the ways in which animals search and compete for food in groups--has been relatively neglected. This book redresses that situation by providing both a synthesis of the existing literature and a new theory of social foraging. Giraldeau and Caraco develop models informed by game theory that offer a new framework for analysis. Social Foraging Theory contains the most comprehensive theoretical approach to its subject, coupled with quantitative...