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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Zoology & animal sciences > Animal behaviour
Parasites have evolved numerous complex and fascinating ways of interacting with their hosts. The subject attracts the interest of numerous biologists from the perspective of ecology and behavioral biology, as well as from those concerned with more applied aspects of parasitology. However, until now there has been no recent book to synthesize this field. This book, written by leading authorities from the USA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, provides the most comprehensive coverage of this important topic on the market.
The Selfish Gene is a classic exposition of evolutionary thought. In it Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for the replication of genes. The book provoked widespread and heated debate, which in part led Dawkins to write The Extended Phenotype, in which he gave a deeper clarification of the central concept of the gene as the unit of selection, as well as contributing his own development of this insight. For the first time, The Extended Selfish Gene brings these two books together, by including two key chapters from The Extended Phenotype. These chapters provide Dawkins's detailed and powerful response to two issues raised by critics of The Selfish Gene: the accusations of genetic determinism (the idea that our behaviour is entirely determined by our genes), and of "adaptationism " (that all traits are indiscriminately perceived to be adaptations resulting from natural selection). While written in particular for the biology community, Dawkins's clarity of expression allows these chapters to be accessible to all who are seriously engaged with the gene's eye view and its implications. The imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant Selfish Gene not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanized the biology community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research. Forty years later, its insights remain as significant as on the day it was published. Along with the two extra chapters, The Extended Selfish Gene includes a new epilogue to The Selfish Gene from the author which highlights the relevance of the gene's eye view to evolutionary biology today.
In Minding Animals, Marc Bekoff takes us on an exhilarating tour of the emotional and mental world of animals, where we meet creatures who do amazing things and whose lives are filled with mysteries. Following in the footsteps of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, Bekoff has spent the last 30 years studying animals of every stripe--from coyotes in Wyoming to penguins in Antarctica. He draws on this vast experience, as well as on the observations of other naturalists, to offer readers fascinating stories of animal behavior, including grooming and gossip, feeding patterns, dreaming, dominance, and mating behavior. He offers a thought-provoking look at animal cognition, intelligence, and consciousness and he presents vivid examples of animal passions, highlighting the deep emotional lives of our animal kin. All this serves as background for his thoughtful conclusions about humility and animal protection and animal well-being, where he urges a new paradigm of respect, grace, compassion, and love for all animals. Minding Animals is an important contribution to our understanding of animal consciousness, a major work that will be a must read for anyone who loves nature. "To find out about the rich emotional life of nonhuman species, read Minding Animals."---Natural History
In exploring socially-maintained behavioral traditions in animals other than humans, this study treats traditions as biological phenomena amenable to comparative evaluation in the same way as other biological phenomena. Concerned with how widely shared features of social life and learning abilities can lead to traditions in many species, it differs from other books in its emphasis on explicit evaluation of alternative theories and methods, and in the breadth of species covered. It is essential reading for students and researchers in animal behavior, anthropology and psychology.
Reviews: Methods and Technology in Fish Biology and Fisheries published by Kluwer Academic Publishers is a book series dedicated to the publication of information on advanced, forward-looking methodologies, technologies, or perspectives in fish and is especially dedicated to relevant topics addressing global, fisheries. This series international concern in fish and fisheries. Humans continue to challenge our environments with new technologies and technological applications. The dynamic creativity of our own species often tends to place the greatest burden on our supporting ecosystems. This is especially true for aquatic networks of creeks, lakes, rivers and ocean environments. We also frequently use our conceptual powers to balance conflicting requirements and demands on nature and continue to develop new approaches and tools to provide sustainable resources as well as conserve what we hold most dear on local and global scales. This book series will provide a window into the developing dynamic among humans, aquatic ecosystems (both freshwater and marine), and the organisms that inhabit aquatic environments. There are many reasons to doubt the increasing social and economic value technology has gained over the last two centuries. Science and technology represent stages in human development. I agree with Ernst Mayer when he said in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988) that "endeavors to solve all scientific problems by pure logic and refined measurements are unproductive, if not totally irrelevant.
There are more than 6000 species belonging to twenty-seven orders in the Class Mammalia. Comparative studies of this diverse and magnificent array of extant species provide valuable opportunities to formulate and test hypotheses concerning the evolution of reproduction. This is the first book to explore, in depth and breadth, the complex interrelationships that exist between patterns of mating behaviour and the evolution of mammalian reproductive anatomy and physiology. It focuses upon the role that copulatory and post-copulatory sexual selection have played during the evolution of the monotremes, marsupials and placental mammals, and examines the effects of sperm competition and cryptic female choice upon coevolution of the genitalia in the two sexes. In addition, due weight is also given to discussions of the modes of life of mammals, and to the roles played by natural selection and phylogeny in determining their reproductive traits.
In most terrestrial and aquatic habitats, the vast majority of animals transmitting and receiving communicative signals are arthropods. This book presents the story of how this important group of animals use pheromones, sound, vibration, and light for sexual and social communication. Because of their small to minute body size most arthropods have problems sending and receiving acoustic and optical information, each of which have their own severe constraints. Because of these restraints they have developed chemical signaling which is not similarly limited by scale. Presenting the latest theoretical and experimental findings from studies of signaling, it suggests that close parallels between arthropods and vertebrates reflect a very limited number of solutions to problems in behavior that are available within the confines of physical laws.
This book provides an overview of recent research presenting conflicting interpretations of children's understanding of the psychology of pretense and describes sociocultural factors which influence children's pretenses. Studies of nonhuman primates provide examples of their pretenses and other simulative activities, explore their representational and imaginative capacities and compare their skills with children. Although the psychological requirements for pretending are controversial, evidence presented in this volume suggests that great apes and even monkeys may share capacities for imagination with children and that children's early pretenses may be less psychological than they appear.
Measuring Behaviour is the established go-to text for anyone interested in scientific methods for studying the behaviour of animals or humans. It is widely used by students, teachers and researchers in a variety of fields, including biology, psychology, the social sciences and medicine. This new fourth edition has been completely rewritten and reorganised to reflect major developments in how behavioural studies are conducted. It includes new sections on the replication crisis, covering Open Science initiatives such as preregistration, as well as fully up-to-date information on the use of remote sensors, big data and artificial intelligence in capturing and analysing behaviour. The sections on the analysis and interpretation of data have been rewritten to align with current practices, with advice on avoiding common pitfalls. Although fully revised and revamped, this new edition retains the simplicity, clarity and conciseness that have made Measuring Behaviour a classic since the first edition appeared more than 30 years ago.
Studies of sexual selection, interspecific mutualism, and intraspecific cooperation show that individuals exchange commodities to their mutual benefit. The exchange values of commodities are a source of conflict, and behavioral mechanisms such as partner choice and contest between competitors determines the composition of trading pairs or groups. These "biological markets" can be examined to gain a better understanding of the underlying principles of evolutionary ecology. In this volume scientists from different disciplines combine insights from economics, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences to look at comparative aspects of economic behavior in humans and other animals.
Important breakthroughs have recently been made in our understanding of the cognitive and sensory abilities of pollinators, such as how pollinators perceive, memorize, and react to floral signals and rewards; how they work flowers, move among inflorescences, and transport pollen. These new findings have obvious implications for the evolution of floral display and diversity, but most existing publications are scattered across a wide range of journals in very different research traditions. This book brings together outstanding scholars from many different fields of pollination biology, integrating the work of neuroethologists and evolutionary ecologists to present a multidisciplinary approach.
This book, part of a series from The Open University in the United Kingdom, is about animal behaviour. The behaviour of animals, including humans, is very diverse and often very complex. Studying behaviour draws on the work of scientists from several disciplines, including ethologists, psychologists, physiologists and biochemists. The question that most of them are interested in answering is: why does an animal behave in the way it does? The possible answers - development, survival value, evolutionary history or cause-and-effect - are the themes that run through this introduction to behaviour and evolution.
We live in a world teeming with parasites. Many animal behaviors, including social interactions, mating displays, and decisions about where to move, nest, and forage are shaped by interactions with parasites. The same is true for humans, where our attraction to mates, hygienic behaviors, food choices, and decisions about when and where to gather in groups often depend on current and perceived infection risk. In turn, behaviors like social distancing and self-medication can alter the trajectories of parasite transmission and evolution, as vividly illustrated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The myriad connections between animal behavior and parasitism have been the subject of growing research interest since the 1970s and 80s, when fundamental theories linking the two fields of study emerged. Since then, a combination of conceptual and technological advances, and increased integration of ideas across disciplines, have helped to uncover fascinating new connections between animal behavior and the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. This accessible text surveys emerging research in this vibrant field. Chapters focus on fundamental topics at the interface of animal behavior and parasitism, and authors have been selected to provide a diverse and international perspective. Animal Behavior and Parasitism is an upper-level text suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate level students as well as professional researchers in animal behavior/behavioral ecology, disease ecology, parasitology, and evolutionary biology.
A book blending evolution and trophic dynamics, taking into account recent advances in both behavioral and population ecology, is long overdue. A central objective of this book is to consider whether adaptive behavioral decisions on the individual organism level might tend to stabilize trophic interactions. A second major goal of the book is to explore the implications of presumably adaptive behaviors on trophic dynamics and the implications of trophic dynamics for the evolution of adaptive behaviors. All evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and behavioral ecologists should find this exciting volume essential reading.
Conditioned taste aversion (CTA) is a robust defence device protecting animals against repeated consumption of toxic food. It is characterised by the ability of many animals to learn to avoid certain substances by their sight, smell, or taste after experiencing an unpleasant or harmful reaction to them. CTA is encountered at all levels of evolution, with similar forms of food aversion learning found in vertebrate and invertebrate species whose ancestral lines diverged more than 500 million years ago. CTA has a number of unusual properties contrasting sharply with the basic assumptions of traditional learning theories, which has brought it increasingly to the attention of neurobiologists interested in neural plasticity. In CTA, the usual time parameters between stimulus and aversion are relaxed considerably, frequently with delays of hours rather than seconds. Moreover, the critical stage of CTA acquisition may proceed under deep anaesthesia incompatible with other forms of learning. In the past decade several pivotal discoveries have considerably avanced our understanding of the neural processes underlying CTA, and opened new possibilities for their analysis at the molecular and cellular levels. This book, written by three of the world's leading researchers in the subject, comprehensively reviews the current state of research into conditioned taste aversion. The first book of its kind to provide an up-to-date summary of research into the neuroanatomy, pharmacology, electrophysiology, and functional morphology of CTA, it will be welcomed by all researchers and graduate students in the field.
In the century and a half since Charles Darwin first began formulating his theories on evolution much research has been conducted on primate cognition. In this book, Michael Tomasello and Josep Call set out to review all that is scientifically known about the cognitive skills of nonhuman primates and to assess the current state of our knowledge. The authors integrate empirical findings on the topic from the beginning of the century to the present, placing this work in theoretical perspective.
Why does nature love symmetry? In Asymmetry, Developmental Stability and Evolution, Møller and Swaddle analyse the evolutionary implications of symmetry. They advance and explain their theory that symmetry is related to genetic stability and fitness, and that symmetric individuals appear to have quantifiable and significant advantages over their asymmetric counterparts. When assessing potential mates or competitors, animals may be able to use symmetry as an honest indication of quality. This interdisciplinary book, with its associated Web-site, will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, and animal behaviour.
A visually stunning, photographically driven celebration of bird migration-one of the great marvels of the natural world The vast transcontinental journeys made every year by millions of feathered migrants were not known to naturalists before the late nineteenth century. Even today, while cutting-edge technology such as geolocators and isotope analysis helps us map these journeys in detail, much of the science remains poorly understood. In this luxuriously illustrated volume, celebrated nature writer Mike Unwin and award-winning photographer David Tipling highlight sixty-seven different species of birds from around the world and explore how each has adapted to its migratory cycle. As they bring to life the drama of the Bar-headed Goose's journey over the Himalayas and the amazing sixty-thousand-mile annual round trip taken by the Arctic Tern between the United Kingdom and Antarctica, Unwin and Tipling offer deep insights into the science, mysteries, and wonders of migration.
Do Animals have ideas? Do they experience pain like humans? Do they think about objects that they cannot see? About situations that have occurred in the past? Do they consciously make plans for the future or do they simply react unthinkingly to objects as they appear and situations as they arise? All of these questions have bearing on whether or not animals have consciousness. The advent of computers that "think" has lead us to consider "intelligence" in a way we never thought possible a decade ago. But when and how does information processing in the brain become automatic?In "Minds of Their Own, " Lesley J. Rogers examines the issue of animal thought both sympathetically and critically by looking at the different behavior characteristics of a variety of animals, the evolution of the brain and when consciousness might have evolved. To most people, to be conscious means to be aware of oneself as well as to be aware of others. But does this hold true for animals? The answer may have implications which transcend mere scientific inquiry: if animals are cognizant creatures, what, if any, moral responsibility do humans have to assure their rights? This timely book examines this issue and others by emphasizing comparisons between humans and animals: how we evolved; how we remember; how we learn.
Unlike nearly all science books which tell of successful ventures and satisfactory conclusions, this book reveals the harsher but more common side of scientific research. Written by one of this century's most distinguished small mammal ecologists, it is both a personal history of and an apology for a life in science spent working on problems for which no final dramatic closure was reached. Included along the way are important anecdotes and history about Charles Elton and his pioneering work at the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford University, from which much of modern population has grown, and insights on the philosophy and practice of science. This eye-opening account of a scientific career should be read by everyone in life sciences or the history and philosophy of science.
In the last ten years, the "comparative method" has been revolutionized by modern statistical ways of incorporating phylogenies into the design and analysis of comparative studies. The results of this revolution are particularly important in the study of animal behavior, which has relied on interspecific comparisons to infer universal trends and evolutionary patterns. The chapters of this edited volume consider the impact of modern phylogenetic comparative methods on the study of animal behavior and discuss the main issues that need to be considered in design and analysis of a comparative study, considers possible differences between the evolution of behavior and the evolution of morphology, and reviews how phylogenetic comparative studies have been used in certain areas of behavioral research.
Biologists since Darwin have been intrigued and confounded by the complex issues involved in the evolution and ecology of the social behavior of insects. The self-sacrifice of sterile workers in ant colonies has been particularly difficult for evolutionary biologists to explain. In this important new book, Andrew Bourke and Nigel Franks not only present a detailed overview of the current state of scientific knowledge about social evolution in ants, but also show how studies on ants have contributed to an understanding of many fundamental topics in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. One of the substantial contributions of "Social Evolution in Ants" is its clear explanation of kin selection theory and sex ratio theory and their applications to social evolution in insects. Working to dispel lingering skepticism about the validity of kin selection and, more broadly, of "selfish gene" theory, Bourke and Franks show how these ideas underpin the evolution of both cooperation and conflict within ant societies. In addition, using simple algebra, they provide detailed explanations of key mathematical models. Finally, the authors discuss two relatively little-known topics in ant social biology: life history strategy and mating systems. This comprehensive, up-to-date, and well-referenced work will appeal to all researchers in social insect biology and to scholars and students in the fields of entomology, behavioral ecology, and evolution.
The field of nonverbal communication is a strategic site for demonstrating the inextricable interrelationship between nature and culture in human behaviour. This book, originally published in 1997, aims to explode the misconception that "biology" is something that automatically precludes or excludes "culture". Instead, it points to the necessary grounding of our social and cultural capabilities in biological givens and elucidates how biological factors are systematically co-opted for cultural purposes. The book presents a complex picture of human communicative ability as simultaneously biologically and socioculturally influenced, with some capacities apparently more biologically hard-wired than others: face recognition, imitation, emotional communication, and the capacity for language. It also suggests that the dividing line between nonverbal and linguistic communication is becoming much less clear-cut. The contributing authors are leading researchers in a variety of fields, writing here for a general audience. The book is divided into sections dealing with, respectively, human universals, evolutionary and developmental aspects of nonverbal behaviour within a sociocultural context, and finally, the multifaceted relationships between nonverbal communication and culture.
How do bats catch insects in the dark? How do bees learn which flowers to visit? How do food-storing birds remember where their hoards are? Questions like these are addressed by neuroethology, the branch of behavioral neuroscience concerned with analyzing the neural bases of naturally occurring behaviors.This book brings together thirteen chapters presenting findings on perceptual and cognitive processes in some of the most active areas of neuroethological research, including auditory localization by bats and owls, song perception and learning in birds, pitch processing by frogs and toads, imprinting in birds, spatial memory in birds, learning in bees and in "Aplysia, " and electroreception in fish. A variety of approaches are represented, such as field studies, psychophysical tests, electrophysiological experiments, lesion studies, comparative neuroanatomy, and studies of development.Each chapter gives an up-to-date overview of a particular author's research and places it within the broader context of issues about animal perception and cognition. The book as a whole exemplifies how studying species and their particular specializations can inform general issues in psychology, ethology, and neuroscience.
This book arrays recent research on the neural and behavioral lateralization of the brain relying heavily on animal modes. The authors employ the comparative method to enhance our understanding of behavior, specifically through hand use and "handedness" by drawing comparisons with studies involving primates. Topics discussed include Patterns of Lateralized Behavior in Prosimians; Behavioral Lateralization in Language-Trained Chimpanzees; Patterns of Handedness: Comparative Study of Nursery School Children and Captive Gorillas; and Rotational Behavior in Children and Adults. It is the first book of its kind devoted entirely to the question of behavioral asymmetries in all primates and thus presents a milestone as it recognizes the accumulating evidence of asymmetry and lateralized behavior in the non-human nervous system. |
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