The bonobo, along with the chimpanzee, is one of our two closest living relatives. Their relatively narrow geographic range (south of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo) combined with the history of political instability in the region, has made their scientific study extremely difficult. In contrast, there are dozens of wild and captive sites where research has been conducted for decades with chimpanzees. Because data sets on bonobos have been so hard to obtain and so few large-scale studies have been published, the majority of researchers have treated chimpanzee data as being representative of both species. However, this misconception is now rapidly changing. With relative stability in the DRC for over a decade and a growing community of bonobos living in zoos and sanctuaries internationally, there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the bonobo with dozens of high impact publications focusing on this fascinating species. This research has revealed exactly how unique bonobos are in their brains and behavior, and reminds us why it is so important that we redouble our efforts to protect the few remaining wild populations of this iconic and highly endangered great ape species.

This book traces the evolution of the dog, from its origins about 15,000 years ago up to recent times. The timing of dog domestication receives attention, with comparisons between different genetics-based models and archaeological evidence. Allometric patterns between dogs and their ancestors, wolves, shed light on the nature of the morphological changes that dogs underwent. Dog burials highlight a unifying theme of the whole book: the development of a distinctive social bond between dogs and people; the book also explores why dogs and people relate so well to each other. Though cosmopolitan in overall scope, the greatest emphasis is on the New World, with an entire chapter devoted to dogs of the arctic regions, mostly in the New World. Discussion of several distinctive modern roles of dogs underscores the social bond between dogs and people.

Are selfishness and individuality--rather than kindness and cooperation--basic to biological nature? Does a "selfish gene" create universal sexual conflict? In "The Genial Gene, "Joan Roughgarden forcefully rejects these and other ideas that have come to dominate the study of animal evolution. Building on her brilliant and innovative book "Evolution's Rainbow, "in which she challenged accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation, Roughgarden upends the notion of the selfish gene and the theory of sexual selection and develops a compelling and controversial alternative theory called social selection. This scientifically rigorous, model-based challenge to an important tenet of neo-Darwinian theory emphasizes cooperation, elucidates the factors that contribute to evolutionary success in a gene pool or animal social system, and vigorously demonstrates that to identify Darwinism with selfishness and individuality misrepresents the facts of life as we now know them.

Understanding the interaction between cooperation and conflict in establishing effective social behaviour is a fundamental challenge facing societies. Reflecting the breadth of current research in this area, this volume brings together experts from biology to political science to examine the cooperation–conflict interface at multiple levels, from genes to human societies. Exploring both the exciting new directions and the biggest challenges in their fields, the authors focus on identifying commonalities across species and disciplines to help understand what features are shared broadly and what are limited to specific contexts. Each chapter is written to be accessible to students and researchers from interdisciplinary backgrounds, with text boxes explaining terminology and concepts that may not be familiar across disciplinary boundaries, while being a valuable resource to experts in their fields.

Throughout their lives animals must complete many tasks, including finding food, avoiding predators, attracting mates, and navigating through a complex and dynamic environment. Consequently, they have evolved a staggering array of sensory organs that are fundamental to survival and reproduction and shape much of their evolution and behaviour. Sensory ecology deals with how animals acquire, process, and use information in their lives, and the sensory systems involved. It investigates the type of information that is gathered by animals, how it is used in a range of behaviours, and the evolution of such traits. It deals with both mechanistic questions (e.g. how sensory receptors capture information from the environment, and how the physical attributes of the environment affect information transmission) and functional questions (e.g. the adaptive significance of the information used by the animal to make a decision). Recent research has dealt more explicitly with how sensory systems are involved with and even drive evolutionary change, including the formation of new species. Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution provides a broad introduction to sensory ecology across a wide range of taxonomic groups, covering all the various sensory modalities (e.g. sound, visual, chemical, magnetic, and electric) relating to diverse areas spanning anti-predator strategies, foraging, mate choice, navigation and more, with the aim being to illustrate key principles and differences. This accessible textbook is suitable for senior undergraduates, graduate students, and professional academics taking courses or conducting research in sensory ecology/biology, neuroethology, behavioural and evolutionary ecology, communication, and signalling. It will also be of relevance and use to psychologists interested in sensory information and behaviour.

In einer unterhaltsamen wie anspruchsvollen und packenden Zeitreise entlang der diversen Theorien zur Entwicklung des Lebendigen, fuhrt uns der Altmeister der Systemtheorie des Erkennens von der "heroischen Phase" uber die "ideologische" bis hin zur heutigen "systemischen Phase." Seine Auseinandersetzung mit zahllosen Biologen und ihren Theorien grundet auf die beiden Ansichten, dass man den Zustand von Theorien am besten aus deren Geschichte heraus versteht und dass ein wechselseitiger Zusammenhang zwischen Zeitgeist und biologischen Theorien besteht. Professor Riedl legt uns mit diesem Buch eine Kulturgeschichte der Evolutionstheorie vor mit dem Ziel, den Wandel von Einsichten im Laufe unserer kulturellen Entwicklung zu sehen und zu erkennen. Ein Muss fur jeden Biologen und Philosophen."

Mother and infant negotiate over food; two high-status males jockey for power; female kin band together to get their way. It happens among humans and it happens among our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, the great apes of Africa. In this eye-opening book, we see precisely how such events unfold in chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas: through a spontaneous, mutually choreographed dance of actions, gestures, and vocalizations in which social partners create meaning and come to understand each other.

Using dynamic systems theory, an approach employed to study human communication, Barbara King is able to demonstrate the genuine complexity of apes' social communication, and the extent to which their interactions generate meaning. As King describes, apes create meaning primarily through their body movements--and go well beyond conveying messages about food, mating, or predators. Readers come to know the captive apes she has observed, and others across Africa as well, and to understand "the process of creating social meaning."

This new perspective not only acquaints us with our closest living relatives, but informs us about a possible pathway for the evolution of language in our own species. King's theory challenges the popular idea that human language is instinctive, with rules and abilities hardwired into our brains. Rather, "The Dynamic Dance" suggests, language has its roots in the gestural "building up of meaning" that was present in the ancestor we shared with the great apes, and that we continue to practice to this day.

Furry and wide-eyed, lorises and pottos are small, nocturnal primates inhabiting African, Asian and Southeast Asian tropical and subtropical forests. Their likeable appearance, combined with their unusual adaptations - from a marked reduction of the tail to their mostly slow, deliberate locomotion, powerful grasping and, in some species, a venomous bite - has led to a significant rise in research interest in the family Lorisidae over the last decade. Furthermore, lorises in particular have featured frequently in international media largely due to illegal trade, for example as pets. This is the first volume to present a full picture of the breadth of research being undertaken on lorisids to aid future studies as well as conservation efforts. Focusing on five key topics: evolutionary biology, ecomorphology, behavioural ecology, captive management and conservation, this book is a vital read for graduate students and researchers in primatology, biological anthropology, evolutionary biology, animal behaviour and conservation.

It is hard to imagine, by their very name, the life sciences not involving the study of living things, but until the twentieth century much of what was known in the field was based primarily on specimens that had long before taken their last breaths. Only in the last century has "ethology"--the study of animal behavior--emerged as a major field of the life sciences.
In "Patterns of Behavior," Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. traces the scientific theories, practices, subjects, and settings integral to the construction of a discipline pivotal to our understanding of the diversity of life. Central to this tale are Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, 1973 Nobel laureates whose research helped legitimize the field of ethology and bring international attention to the culture of behavioral research. Demonstrating how matters of practice, politics, and place all shaped "ethology's ecologies," Burkhardt's book offers a sensitive reading of the complex interplay of the field's celebrated pioneers and a richly textured reconstruction of ethology's transformation from a quiet backwater of natural history to the forefront of the biological sciences. Winner of the 2006 Pfizer Awad from the History of Science Society

The bonobo, along with the chimpanzee, is one of our two closest living relatives. Their relatively narrow geographic range (south of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo) combined with the history of political instability in the region, has made their scientific study extremely difficult. In contrast, there are dozens of wild and captive sites where research has been conducted for decades with chimpanzees. Because data sets on bonobos have been so hard to obtain and so few large-scale studies have been published, the majority of researchers have treated chimpanzee data as being representative of both species. However, this misconception is now rapidly changing. With relative stability in the DRC for over a decade and a growing community of bonobos living in zoos and sanctuaries internationally, there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the bonobo with dozens of high impact publications focusing on this fascinating species. This research has revealed exactly how unique bonobos are in their brains and behavior, and reminds us why it is so important that we redouble our efforts to protect the few remaining wild populations of this iconic and highly endangered great ape species.

The Tai Chimpanzee Project (Tai National Park, Cote D'Ivoire) has yielded unprecedented insights into the nature of cooperation, cognition, and culture in our closest living relatives. Founded in 1979 by Christophe and Hedwige Boesch, the project has entered its 40th year of continuous research. Alongside other famous long-term chimpanzee study sites at Gombe and Mahale in East Africa, the tireless work of the team at Tai has contributed to the fields of behavioural ecology and anthropology, as well as improving public awareness of the urgent need to protect this already endangered species. Encompassing important research topics including chimpanzee ecology, reproductive behaviour, tool use, culture, communication, cognition and conservation, this book provides an engaging account of how Tai chimpanzees are adapted to African jungle life and how they have developed unique forms of cooperation with less violence, regular adoptions and complex cultural differences between groups.

As our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees offer tantalizing clues about the behavior of early human ancestors. This book provides a rich and detailed portrait of chimpanzee social life in the wild, synthesizing hundreds of thousands of hours of research at seven long-term field sites. Why are the social lives of males and females so different? Why do groups of males sometimes seek out and kill neighboring individuals? Do chimpanzees cooperate when they hunt monkeys? Is their vocal behaviour like human speech? Are there different chimpanzee 'cultures'? Addressing these questions and more, Adam Arcadi presents a fascinating introduction to the chimpanzee social universe and the challenges we face in trying to save this species from extinction. With extensive notes organized by field site and an appendix describing field methods, this book is indispensable for students, researchers, and anyone else interested in the remarkable and complex world of these intelligent apes.

Foraging is fundamental to animal survival and reproduction, yet it is much more than a simple matter of finding food; it is a biological imperative. Animals must find and consume resources to succeed, and they make extraordinary efforts to do so. For instance, pythons rarely eat, but when they do, their meals are large--as much as 60 percent larger than their own bodies. The snake's digestive system is normally dormant, but during digestion metabolic rates can increase fortyfold. A python digesting quietly on the forest floor has the metabolic rate of thoroughbred in a dead heat. This and related foraging processes have broad applications in ecology, cognitive science, anthropology, and conservation biology--and they can be further extrapolated in economics, neurobiology, and computer science.
"Foraging "is the first comprehensive review of the topic in more than twenty years. A monumental undertaking, this volume brings together twenty-two experts from throughout the field to offer the latest on the mechanics of foraging, modern foraging theory, and foraging ecology. The fourteen essays cover all the relevant issues, including cognition, individual behavior, caching behavior, parental behavior, antipredator behavior, social behavior, population and community ecology, herbivory, and conservation. Considering a wide range of taxa, from birds to mammals to amphibians, "Foraging" will be the definitive guide to the field.

"Cheetahs of the Serengeti Plains" is the most comprehensive account of carnivore social behavior to date. Synthesizing more than a decade of research in the wild, this book offers a detailed account of the behavior and ecology of cheetahs. Compared with other large cats, and other mammals, cheetahs have an unusual breeding system; whereas lions live in prides and tigers are solitary, some cheetahs live in groups while others live by themselves. Tim Caro explores group and solitary living among cheetahs and discovers that the causes of social behavior vary dramatically, even within a single species.
Why do cheetah cubs stay with their mother for a full year after weaning? Why do adolescents remain in groups? Why do adult males live in permanent associations with each other? Why do adult females live alone? Through observations on the costs and benefits of group living, Caro offers new insight into the complex behavior of this extraordinary species. For example, contrary to common belief about cooperative hunting in large carnivores, he shows that neither adolescents nor adult males benefit from hunting in groups.
With many surprising findings, and through comparisons with other cat species, Caro enriches our understanding of the evolution of social behavior and offers new perspectives on conservation efforts to save this charismatic and endangered carnivore.

In this first comprehensive synthesis of the literature on food hoarding in animals, Stephen B. Vander Wall discusses how animals store food, how they use food and how this use affects individual fitness, why and how food hoarding evolved, how cached food is lost, mechanisms for protecting and recovering cached food, physiological and behavioral factors that influence hoarding, and the impact that hoarding animals have on plant populations and plant dispersal. He then provides detailed coverage of hoarding behavior across taxa--mammals, birds, and arthropods--to address issues in evolution, ecology, and behavior.
Drawings, photographs, and appendixes document complex and intrinsically interesting food-hoarding behaviors, and the bibliography of nearly 1,500 sources is itself an invaluable and unique reference.

How do animals communicate using sounds? How did animal vocal communication arise and evolve? Exploring a new way to conceptualize animal communication, this new edition moves beyond an earlier emphasis on the role of senders in managing receiver behaviour, to examine how receivers' responses influence signalling. It demonstrates the importance of the perceiver role in driving the evolution of communication, for instance in mimicry, and thus shifts the emphasis from a linguistic to a form/function approach to communication. Covering a wide range of animals from frogs to humans, this new edition includes new sections on human prosodic elements in speech, the vocal origins of smiles and laughter and deliberately irritating sounds and is ideal for researchers and students of animal behaviour and in fields such as sensory biology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

Tracking is a much-loved, yet difficult, subject that attracts at least some of the attention of almost every bush-goer who ventures into the wild places of southern Africa. The ability to accurately read difficult, partial or little-seen signs left in the soil or sand is rare and largely the domain of professionals. However, by making use of a comprehensive guide, anyone who applies him- or herself can begin to decipher these natural hieroglyphs etched on the ground. In this volume, Louis Liebenberg's highly accurate sketches of animal tracks, showing all the details one would find in a perfect example of the spoor, are combined with a wide selection of extremely varied photographs that explain the difficult truth of the matter, and represent what you are most likely to actually see in the many different substrates where the animals walk. This field guide to mammal tracks and signs also serves as an ID guide to the mammals of southern Africa as full colour photographs of each animal are included.

In this book, the authors gather and present current research in the study of the behaviour, classification and diseases relating to the feline species. Topics discussed in this compilation include the use of Type 1 interferon for treating feline retrovirosis; new advances in the diagnosis, epizootiology and taxonomy of feline piroplasmids; feline hepatozoonosis and the resurrection of hepatozoon felis; the role of cats in toxoplasma gondii infection; and the therapeutic effect of melatonin in feline uveitis.

Masson begins by asking if we ever know precisely what another person is actually feeling. It may be no harder, he argues, to discover the truth about feelings in dogs. Yet for all their evident loyalty, heroism and compassion, Masson highlights research which shows that dogs lie in a universe of scent a hundred million times more acutely appreciated than by man. It is a world of emotions readily available only to other dogs. To discover more about the complex but transparent nature of canine emotional responses, Masson acquired three large dogs to from a community with his own family and set about a close scrutiny of their feelings - the first, he says since Charles Darwin pointed us in the right direction 125 years ago.

Darwin's work of 1872 still provides the point of departure for research in the theory of emotion and expression. Although he lacked the modern research tool of cybernetics, his basic methods have not been improved upon: the study of infants, of the insane, of paintings and sculpture, of some of the commoner animals; the use of photographs of expression submitted to different judges; and the comparative study of expression among different peoples. This new edition will be warmly welcomed by those behavioral scientists who have recently shown an intense interest in the scientific study of expression. Lay readers, too, will be struck by the freshness and directness of this book, which includes, among other data, Darwin's delightfully objective analysis of his own baby's smiles and pouts.

In more ways than we may sometimes care to acknowledge, the human being is just another primate--it is certainly only very rarely that researchers into cognition, emotion, personality, and behavior in our species and in other primates come together to compare notes and share insights. This book, one of the few comprehensive attempts at integrating behavioral research into human and nonhuman primates, does precisely that--and in doing so, offers a clear, in-depth look at the mutually enlightening work being done in psychology and primatology.

Relying on theories of behavior derived from psychology rather than ecology or biological anthropology, the authors, internationally known experts in primatology and psychology, focus primarily on social processes in areas including aggression, conflict resolution, sexuality, attachment, parenting, social development and affiliation, cognitive development, social cognition, personality, emotions, vocal and nonvocal communication, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology. They show nonhuman primates to be far more complex, cognitively and emotionally, than was once supposed, with provocative implications for our understanding of supposedly unique human characteristics. Arguing that both human and nonhuman primates are distinctive for their wide range of context-sensitive behaviors, their work makes a powerful case for the future integration of human and primate behavioral research.

Primatology draws on theory and methods from diverse fields, including anatomy, anthropology, biology, ecology, medicine, psychology, veterinary sciences and zoology. The more than 500 species of primate range from tiny mouse lemurs to huge gorillas, and primatologists collect data in a variety of environments including in the field, research facilities, museums, sanctuaries, zoos, and from the literature. The variability in research interests, study animals and research sites means that there are no standard protocols for how to study primates. Nevertheless, asking good questions and designing appropriate studies to answer them are vital to produce high quality science. This accessible guide for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers explains how to develop a research question, formulate testable hypotheses and predictions, design and conduct a project and report the results. The focus is on research integrity and ethics throughout, and the book provides practical advice on overcoming common difficulties researchers face.

The size and composition of primate groups varies tremendously across species, within species, and within groups over time. Written by leading authorities, this book focuses on the causes and consequences of variation in the number of males per group. This variation lies at the heart of understanding adaptive variation among primate social systems. The volume also provides an extensive overview of variation in group composition across all major primate taxa using up-to-date reviews, case studies, evolutionary theory, and theoretical models. A comparative review of birds and selected other mammals is included. This text will become a favorite with all those interested in the behavioral ecology of primates.

Essays discuss migration, courtship, the care of young, camouflage, hunting techniques, and symbiotic relationships.

In this ambitious and unusual work, evolutionary biologist Gordon H Orians explores the role of evolution in human responses to the environment, beginning with why we have emotions and ending with evolutionary approaches to aesthetics. Orians reveals how our emotional lives today are shaped by decisions our ancestors made centuries ago on African savannas as they selected places to live, sought food and safety, and socialized in small hunter-gatherer groups. During this time our likes and dislikes became wired in our brains, as the appropriate responses to the environment meant the difference between survival or death. His rich analysis explains why we mimic the tropical savannas of our ancestors in our parks and gardens, why we are simultaneously attracted to danger and approach it cautiously, and how paying close attention to nature's sounds has resulted in us being an unusually musical species. We also learn why we have developed discriminating palates for wine, and why we have strong reactions to some odors, and why we enjoy classifying almost everything.