When a predator attacks, prey are faced with a series of 'if', 'when' and 'how' escape decisions - these critical questions are the foci of this book. Cooper and Blumstein bring together a balance of theory and empirical research to summarise over fifty years of scattered research and benchmark current thinking in the rapidly expanding literature on the behavioural ecology of escaping. The book consolidates current and new behaviour models with taxonomically divided empirical chapters that demonstrate the application of escape theory to different groups. The chapters integrate behaviour with physiology, genetics and evolution to lead the reader through the complex decisions faced by prey during a predator attack, examining how these decisions interact with life history and individual variation. The chapter on best practice field methodology and the ideas for future research presented throughout, ensure this volume is practical as well as informative.

This book aims to reconcile theoretical models of population dynamics with what is currently known about the population dynamics of large mammalian herbivores. It arose from a working group established at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to address the need for models that better accommodate environmental variability, especially for herbivores dependent on changing vegetation resources. The initial chapter reviews findings from definitive long-term studies of certain other ungulate populations, many based on individually identifiable animals. Other chapters cover climatic influences, emphasising temperate versus tropical contrasts, and demographic processes underlying population dynamics, more generally. There are new assessments of irruptive population dynamics, and of the consequences of landscape heterogeneity for herbivore populations. An initial review of candidate population models is followed up by a final chapter outlining how these models might be modified to better accommodate environmental variability. The contents provide a foundation for resolving problems of diminishing large mammal populations in Africa, over-abundant ungulate populations elsewhere, and general consequences of global change for biodiversity conservation. This book will serve as a definitive outline of what is currently known about the population dynamics of large herbivores.

Behavior studies now span a variety of sub-disciplines, including behavioral ecology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and evolutionary developmental biology. While the fields' rapid growth has led to startling new insights into animal behavior, it has brought increasingly fragmented approaches to the subject. Integrating ideas and findings from a range of disciplines, this book provides a common framework for understanding diverse issues in behavior studies. The framework is derived from classical ethology, incorporating concepts and data from research in experimental psychology, neurophysiology and evolutionary biology. Hogan outlines the origin and development of major ideas and issues in the field, drawing on examples throughout to highlight connections across sub-disciplines. Demonstrating how results in one area can directly inform work in others, the book ultimately proposes concepts to facilitate new discussions that will open the way for improved dialog between researchers across behavior studies.

Recent developments in behavioural neuroscience and genomics are providing exciting new tools for understanding mammalian evolution. Drawing on a range of disciplines including genomic reprogramming, immunology, genomic imprinting, placentation and brain development, this book examines the leading role played by the mother's genome and epigenome in the successful evolutionary progression of humans from ancestral mammals. Keverne begins by discussing the historic context of the perceived dominance of males and the patriline, before arguing that it is instead the matriline that exerts the dominant influence in shaping the evolution of our brain development and behaviour, especially the co-adaptive development of brain and placenta. Presenting a balanced outlook on the development of sex differences and an alternative to traditional views, Beyond Sex Differences will be of interest to anyone studying and researching mother and infant development.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, SAB 2016, held in Aberystwyth, UK, in August 2016. The 31 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. They cover the main areas in animat research, including the animat approach and methodology, perception and motor control, learning and adaptation, evolution, and collective and social behavior.

The cognitive abilities of birds are remarkable: hummingbirds integrate spatial and temporal information about food sources, day-old chicks have a sense of numbers, parrots can make and use tools, and ravens have sophisticated insights in social relationships. This volume describes the full range of avian cognitive abilities, the mechanisms behind such abilities and how they relate to the ecology of the species. Synthesising the latest research in avian cognition, a range of experts in the field provide first-hand insights into experimental procedures, outcomes and theoretical advances, including a discussion of how the findings in birds relate to the cognitive abilities of other species, including humans. The authors cover a range of topics such as spatial cognition, social learning, tool use, perceptual categorization and concept learning, providing the broader context for students and researchers interested in the current state of avian cognition research, its key questions and appropriate experimental approaches.

Birds migrating across the Himalayan region fly over the highest peaks in the world, facing immense physiological and climatic challenges. The authors show the different strategies used by birds to cope with these challenges. Many wetland avian species are seen in the high-altitude lakes of the Himalayas and the adjoining Tibetan Plateau, such as Bar-Headed Geese. Ringing programmes have generated information about origins and destinations, and this book is the first to present information on the bird's exact migratory paths. Capitalising on knowledge generated through satellite telemetry, the authors describe the migratory routes of a multitude of birds flying over or skirting the Himalayas. The myriad of threats to migratory birds and the wetland system in the Central Asian Flyway are discussed, with ways to mitigate them. This volume will inform and persuade policy-makers and conservation practitioners to take appropriate measures for the long-term survival of this unique migration.

This book covers advances made since the 2004 Springer volume "Polarized Light in Animal Vision" edited by Horvath and Varju, but also provides reviews and synopses of some areas. Part I examines polarization sensitivity across many animal taxa including vertebrates and invertebrates and details both terrestrial and aquatic life. Part II is devoted to the description of polarized light in nature and explores how the physics of light must be taken into account when understanding how polarized light is detected by the visual system. This includes underwater polarization due to scattering; polarization patterns reflected from freshwater bodies; polarization characteristics of forest canopies; normal and anomalous polarization patterns of the skies; skylight polarization transmitted through Snell's window and both linearly and circularly polarized signals produced by terrestrial and aquatic animals. This Part also examines polarized "light pollution" induced by anthropogenic factors such as reflection off asphalt surfaces, glass panes, car bodies, and other man-made structures that are now known to form ecological traps for polarotactic insects. Part III surveys some of the practical applications of polarization vision including polarization-based traps for biting insects, ground-based polarimetric cloud detectors and an historical examination of the navigational abilities of Viking seafarers using the sky polarization compass. The deterrent qualities of ungulate pelage to polarization-sensitive biting insects is also examined in this section.

How does behaviour affect biological invasions? Can it explain why some animals are such successful invaders? With contributions from experts in the field, and covering a broad range of animals, this book examines the role of behaviour in biological invasions from the point of view of both invaders and native species. The chapters cover theoretical aspects, particularly relevant behaviours and well-documented case studies, showing that behaviour is critical to the success, and ecological and socio-economic impact, of invasive species. Its insights suggest methods to prevent and mitigate those impacts, and offer unique opportunities to understand the adaptive role of behaviour. Offering a comprehensive overview of current understanding on the subject, the book is intended for biological invasion researchers and behavioural ecologists, as well as ecologists and evolutionary biologists interested in how organisms deal with anthropogenic environmental changes such as climate change and habitat loss.

This timely book revisits cryptic female choice in arthropods, gathering detailed contributions from around the world to address key behavioral, ecological and evolutionary questions. The reader will find a critical summary of major breakthroughs in taxon-oriented chapters that offer many new perspectives and cases to explore and in many cases unpublished data. Many groups of arthropods such as spiders, harvestmen, flies, moths, crickets, earwigs, beetles, eusocial insects, shrimp and crabs are discussed. Sexual selection is currently the focus of numerous and controversial theoretical and experimental studies. Selection in mating and post-mating patterns can be shaped by several different mechanisms, including sperm competition, extreme sexual conflict and cryptic female choice. Discrimination among males during or after copulation is called cryptic female choice because it occurs after intromission, the event that was formerly used as the definitive criterion of male reproductive success and is therefore usually difficult to detect and confirm. Because it sequentially follows intra- and intersexual interactions that occur before copulation, cryptic female choice has the power to alter or negate precopulatory sexual selection. However, though female roles in biasing male paternity after copulation have been proposed for a number of species distributed in many animal groups, cryptic female choice continues to be often underestimated. Furthermore, in recent years the concept of sexual conflict has been frequently misused, linking sexual selection by female choice irrevocably and exclusively with sexually antagonistic co-evolution, without exploring other alternatives. The book offers an essential source of information on how two fields, selective cooperation and individual sex interests, work together in the context of cryptic female choice in nature, using arthropods as model organisms. It is bound to spark valuable discussions among scientists working in evolutionary biology across the world, motivating new generations to unveil the astonishing secrets of sexual biology throughout the animal kingdom.

Woolly monkeys are large, attractive and widespread primates found throughout many parts of the Amazon basin. It is only in the last twenty-five years or so that long-term studies of woollies in their forest habitat have been successful; they have not generally been successfully kept in captivity. But now, especially because of their size, these creatures are pressed on all sides by bush meat hunters and forest fragmentation. Their future is becoming critically precarious and the editors feel that it is time to showcase these animals with a full book. The editors draw together a number of recent woolly monkey studies from three Amazonian countries, including five taxa of woolly monkeys, four of which have recently been reclassified without using new biological criteria as species rather than subspecies (Groves, 2001, 2005; Rylands & Mittermeier, 2009). This volume provides a diversity of studies by well-known researchers and advanced students on a wide range of subjects using newly generated data, including a criticism of the recent taxonomic changes. The varied information contained within The Woolly Monkey: Behavior, Ecology, Systematics and Captive Research will help readers understand these handsome animals and will, we hope, energize them to contribute to their conservation.

This book guides animal ecologists, biologists and wildlife and data managers through a step-by-step procedure to build their own advanced software platforms to manage and process wildlife tracking data. This unique, problem-solving-oriented guide focuses on how to extract the most from GPS animal tracking data, while preventing error propagation and optimizing analysis performance. Based on the open source PostgreSQL/PostGIS spatial database, the software platform will allow researchers and managers to integrate and harmonize GPS tracking data together with animal characteristics, environmental data sets, including remote sensing image time series, and other bio-logged data, such as acceleration data. Moreover, the book shows how the powerful R statistical environment can be integrated into the software platform, either connecting the database with R, or embedding the same tools in the database through the PostgreSQL extension Pl/R. The client/server architecture allows users to remotely connect a number of software applications that can be used as a database front end, including GIS software and WebGIS. Each chapter offers a real-world data management and processing problem that is discussed in its biological context; solutions are proposed and exemplified through ad hoc SQL code, progressively exploring the potential of spatial database functions applied to the respective wildlife tracking case. Finally, wildlife tracking management issues are discussed in the increasingly widespread framework of collaborative science and data sharing. GPS animal telemetry data from a real study, freely available online, are used to demonstrate the proposed examples. This book is also suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, if accompanied by the basics of databases.    

This book presents an overview of modeling definitions and concepts, theory on human behavior and human performance data, available tools and simulation approaches, model development, and application and validation methods. It considers the data and research efforts needed to develop and incorporate functions for the different parameters into comprehensive escape and evacuation simulations, with a number of examples illustrating different aspects and approaches. After an overview of basic modeling approaches, the book discusses benefits and challenges of current techniques. The representation of evacuees is a central issue, including human behavior and the proper implementation of representational tools. Key topics include the nature and importance of the different parameters involved in ASET and RSET and the interactions between them. A review of the current literature on verification and validation methods is provided, with a set of recommended verification tests and examples of validation tests. The book concludes with future challenges: new scenarios and factors for future model developments, addresses the problem of using deterministic and/or stochastic approaches and proposes, and discusses the use of evacuation models for supporting timely decisions in real-time. Written by international experts, Evacuation Modeling Trends is designed for those involved in safety, from emergency and intervention personnel to students, engineers and researchers.

This exciting volume offers an up-to-date tour of current trends in the neurobiology of memory while saluting Raymond Kesner's pioneering contributions to the field as a theorist and researcher, teacher and mentor. Starting with his signature chapter introducing the Attribute Model of Memory, the first half of the book focuses on the central role of the hippocampus in processing dimensions of space and time, and branches out to memory system interactions across brain structures. Later chapters apply the attribute model to multiple functions of memory in learning, and to specific neurological contexts, including Huntington's disease, traumatic brain injury, and Fragile X. As a bonus, the book concludes with an essay on Kesner's life and work, and reminiscences by colleagues. Among the topics covered: How the hippocampus supports the spatial and temporal attributes of memory. Self-regulation of memory processing centers of the brain. Multiple memory systems: the role of Kesner's Attribute Model in understanding the neurobiology of memory. Pattern separation: a key processing deficit associated with aging? * Prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia attributes underlying behavioral flexibility. Memory disruption following traumatic brain injury. Cognitive neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, gerontologists, psychiatrists, and neurobiologists will find The Neurobiological Basis of Memory both enlightening and inspiring--much like Kesner himself.

This edited volume focuses on parasite-host relationships and the behavioral changes parasites may trigger in their hosts. Parasites have developed strategies which enhance their chances to find a host to survive inside its body and to become most easily transmitted to one another. Many of these parasites influence the host's behavior by various mechanisms, so that the rate of their transmissions to further hosts becomes considerably enhanced in comparison to that of non-influenced specimens of the same host species. A broad number of recent studies elucidate more and more examples in an extreme spectrum of host-parasite relationships, where successful transmission and /or survival of a parasite inside a host is based on parasite-derived behavioral manipulations of the hosts. In the literature, an increasing numbers of papers appear which prove that these behavioral alterations are based on complicated psychoimmunologic, neuropharmacologic and genomically steered mechanisms. Researchers working in parasitology or behavioral sciences will find this work thought-provoking, instructive and informative.

Do humans behave much like atoms? Sociophysics, which uses tools and concepts from the physics of disordered matter to describe some aspects of social and political behavior, answers in the affirmative. But advocating the use of models from the physical sciences to understand human behavior could be perceived as tantamount to dismissing the existence of human free will and also enabling those seeking manipulative skills . This thought-provoking book argues it is just the contrary. Indeed, future developments and evaluation will either show sociophysics to be inadequate, thus supporting the hypothesis that people can primarily be considered to be free agents, or valid, thus opening the path to a radically different vision of society and personal responsibility. This book attempts to explain why and how humans behave much like atoms, at least in some aspects of their collective lives, and then proposes how this knowledge can serve as a unique key to a dramatic leap forwards in achieving more social freedom in the real world. At heart, sociophysics and this book are about better comprehending the richness and potential of our social interaction, and so distancing ourselves from inanimate atoms.

Soundscape Ecology represents a new branch of ecology and it is the result of the integration of different disciplines like Landscape ecology, Bioacoustics, Acoustic ecology, Biosemiotics, etc. The soundscape that is the object of this discipline, is defined as the acoustic context resulting from natural and human originated sounds and it is considered a relevant environmental proxy for animal and human life. With Soundscape Ecology Almo Farina means to offer a new cultural tool to investigate a partially explored component of the environmental complexity. For this he intends to set the principles of this new discipline, to delineate the epistemic domain in which to develop new ideas and theories and to describe the necessary integration with all the other ecological/environmental disciplines. The book is organized in ten chapters. The first two chapters delineate principles and theory of soundscape ecology. Chapters three and four describe the bioacoustic and communication theories. Chapter five is devoted to the human dimension of soundscape. Chapters six to eight regard the major sonic patterns like noise, choruses and vibrations. Chapter nine is devoted to the methods in soundscape ecology and finally chapter ten describes the application of the soundscape analysis.

Communication and cognition.- Visual communication: evolution, ecology, and functional mechanisms.- Vocal communication in social groups.- Kin recognition: an overview of conceptual issues, mechanisms and evolutionary theory.- Honeybee cognition.- Individual performance in complex social systems: the greylag goose example.- Conflict and cooperation.- Conflict and conflict resolution in social insects.- Social insects, major evolutionary transitions and multilevel selection.- Cooperation between unrelated individuals - a game theoretic approach.- Group decision-making in animal societies.- Parental care: adjustments to conflict and cooperation.- Sex and reproduction.- The quantitative study of sexual and natural selection in the wild and in the laboratory.- Mate choice and reproductive conflict in simultaneous hermaphrodites.- Extra-pair behaviour.- Extreme polyandry in social Hymenoptera: evolutionary causes and consequences for colony organisation.- Monogynous mating strategies in spiders.- Mating systems, social behaviour and hormones.- Behavioural variation.- The social modulation of behavioural development.- Alternative reproductive tactics and life history phenotypes.- Animal personality and behavioural syndromes.- Social learning and culture in animals.- Levels and mechanisms of behavioural variability.

Experiment and Evacuation.- The UK WTC9/11 Evacuation Study: An Overview of the Methodologies Employed and Some Preliminary Analysis.- Evacuation Movement in Photoluminescent Stairwells.- Automatic Extraction of Pedestrian Trajectories from Video Recordings.- Stairwell Evacuation from Buildings: What We Know We Don't Know.- Evacuation of a High Floor Metro Train in a Tunnel Situation: Experimental Findings.- Using Laser Scanner Data to Calibrate Certain Aspects of Microscopic Pedestrian Motion Models.- Pedestrian Vision and Collision Avoidance Behavior: Investigation of the Information Process Space of Pedestrians Using an Eye Tracker.- FDS+Evac: An Agent Based Fire Evacuation Model.- Comparisons of Evacuation Efficiency and Pre-travel Activity Times in Response to a Sounder and Two Different Voice Alarm Messages.- Design of Voice Alarms-the Benefit of Mentioning Fire and the Use of a Synthetic Voice.- Enhanced Empirical Data for the Fundamental Diagram and the Flow Through Bottlenecks.- Parameters of Pedestrian Flow for Modeling Purposes.- Emergency Preparedness in the Case of a Tsunami-Evacuation Analysis and Traffic Optimization for the Indonesian City of Padang.- Case Studies on Evacuation Behaviour in a Hotel Building in BART and in Real Life.- Analysis of Empirical Trajectory Data of Pedestrians.- Model-Based Real-Time Estimation of Building Occupancy During Emergency Egress.- Experiments on Evacuation Dynamics for Different Classes of Situations.- Prediction and Mitigation of Crush Conditions in Emergency Evacuations.- Start Waves and Pedestrian Movement- An Experimental Study.- Clearance Time for Pedestrian Crossing.- Ship Evacuation-Guidelines, Simulation, Validation, and Acceptance Criteria.- Empirical Study of Pedestrians' Characteristics at Bottlenecks.- RFID Technology Applied for Validation of an Office Simulation Model.- Study on Crowd Flow Outside a Hall via Considering Velocity Distribution of Pedestrians.- Analysis on the Propagation Speed of Pedestrian Reaction: Velocity of Starting Wave and Stopping Wave.- Simulation and Modelling.- Toward Smooth Movement of Crowds.- Modeling Evacuees' Exit Selection with Best Response Dynamics.- Front-to-Back Communication in a Microscopic Crowd Model.- Comparison of Various Methods for the Calculation of the Distance Potential Field.- Agent-Based Simulation of Evacuation: An Office Building Case Study.- A Genetic Algorithm Module for Spatial Optimization in Pedestrian Simulation.- Opinion Formation and Propagation Induced by Pedestrian Flow.- Passenger Dynamics at Airport Terminal Environment.- Application Modes of Egress Simulation.- Investigating the Impact of Aircraft Exit Availability on Egress Time Using Computer Simulation.- Bounded Rationality Choice Model Incorporating Attribute Threshold, Mental Effort, and Risk Attitude: Illustration to Pedestrian Walking Direction Choice Decision in Shopping Streets.- A SCA-Based Model for Open Crowd Aggregation.- Hardware Implementation of a Crowd Evacuation Model Based on Cellular Automata.- Applying a Discrete Event System Approach to Problems of Collective Motion in Emergency Situations.- SIMULEM: Introducing Goal Oriented Behaviours in Crowd Simulation.- Conflicts at an Exit in Pedestrian Dynamics.- Improving Pedestrian Dynamics Modeling Using Fuzzy Logic.- Modeling the Link Volume Counts as a Function of Temporally Dependent OD-Flows.- Effect of Subconscious Behavior on Pedestrian Counterflow in a Lattice Gas Model Under Open Boundary Conditions.- Hand-Calculation Methods for Evacuation Calculation-Last Chance for an Old-Fashioned Approach or a Real Alternative to Microscopic Simulation Tools?.- Adding Higher Intelligent Functions to Pedestrian Agent Model.- "FlowTech" and "EvaTech" Two Computer-Simulation Methods for Evacuation Calculation.- Large Scale Microscopic Evacuation Simulation.- Numerical Optimisation Techniques Applied to Evacuation Analysis.- A Multi-Method Approach to the Interpretation of Pedestrian Spa

Originally published in 1915, this book was written by the renowned British geneticist Reginald Crundall Punnett (1875-1967). Intended to appeal to a broad range of readers, the text presents a concise discussion of mimicry in butterflies and the role of mimicry in the evolutionary process. Illustrative figures and notes are included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in butterflies, the development of evolutionary theory and the history of science.

Originally published in 1942, this book is an introduction to the study of bird psychology. Armstrong covers a wide variety of subjects relating to 'ceremonials' and other rituals conducted by various species of birds, including social hierarchy, courtship, song and arena displays. The text is illustrated with a variety of photographs illustrating some of the practices described. This book will be valuable to anyone with an interest in the conduct and communication of birds.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of fundamental concepts of animal behavior as they relate to insects. Considerably updated and expanded, this new edition includes 26 case studies, as well as 45 new color plates and 173 figures (over 40% of them new) with detailed legends that add richness to the well-written, accessible text.

Using a wealth of anecdotes, data from academic literature, and original research, this very accessible little book highlights how we all struggle to cope with the maelstrom of choices, influences and experiences that come our way. The authors have slogged through piles of dry research papers to provide many wonderful nuggets of information and surprising insights. For example: Why is an upside-down red triangle such a powerful warning sign on the road? What is the best kind of alibi? What makes the number 7 so special? Why is it better to whisper words of love into the left ear? Will that recent marriage last? Why is it that the French eat snails but not slugs? The reader will discover the amazing tools and shortcuts that millennia of evolution have built into our brains. And this knowledge is power! Knowing more about how the human mind connects the dots helps us understand why decision-making is so tricky. With insights from evolutionary psychology, we become better equipped to understand ourselves and others and to interact and communicate more effectively.

Originally published in 1929, this book contains the text of three lectures by George Coghill on the subject of the anatomical basis for typical behavioural development in animals. Coghill takes salamanders as his particular case study to connect the growth of the nervous system in an organism with its observable behaviour. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in animal behaviour and the physiological basis for behaviour.

Along with psychopathology, cognition has been one of the primary phenotypic focal points of the field of behavior genetics since its inception. Francis Galton's 1874 examination of eminent families in Britain was among the earliest attempts to investigate whether cognitive achievements run in families. This volume presents current methodologies for understanding cognitive abilities that move beyond the outdated nature vs. nurture paradigm. Recent advances in both collection and statistical modeling of twin data, particularly longitudinal twin data, make this an especially advantageous moment to produce a work that presents a collection of the groundbreaking research on cognitive abilities across the lifespan. This volume presents an overview of the current state of quantitative and molecular genetic investigations into the many facets of cognitive performance and functioning across the lifespan.