Brazil is home to equatorial, tropical, semi-arid, highland tropical, and subtropical climatic regions. The semiarid region of Northeastern Brazil, considered an area of drought polygon, has distinctive scrub vegetation referred to as Caatinga that covers over 10% of the Brazilian territory with approximately twenty million inhabitants. The Caatinga is considered one of the 37 Wilderness Areas of the World, and it plays an important role in the maintenance of regional macro-ecological processes, as well as indirectly supporting regions with biodiversity and endemism. The Brazilian semiarid region is also home to Neotropical fish species that occur in diversified aquatic ecosystems, exhibiting different strategies to survive and reproduce. In this scenario of fantastic diversity there exists an intensive and yet insufficiently known interaction of environmental factors and fish communities. To fully understand this it is necessary to know the details about how it works. For completed book description please visit our website at the link below.

This book is comprised of important contributions from expert researchers around the world concerning the biology of animals from a variety of approaches. In particular are manuscripts that deal with cellular, biochemical, genetic, reproductive, and ecological themes including various manuscripts regarding invertebrate animals. Regarding this last animal class, the science provides excellent models to study a lot of biological processes that can explain the evolution and diversity of life on the earth's surface. They are simple organisms, the studies of which can contribute to explanations of how the metabolic processes found in vertebrates and humans started and have been maintained. This book also provides results that demonstrate some effects and interactions among environmental conditions and drugs on the morphology and biochemical processes in cells, and it contains reviews concerning the interaction between pathogenic invertebrates and human diseases. The aim of these studies was to provide important results that are not commonly treated in traditional and experimental models within the current scientific scene.