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The central question addressed in this book is this: How is the process of adaptation different if the members of a population live clustered in small groups instead of being homogenously distributed like grass on a lawn? The field is called ‘evolution in subdivided populations’ or ‘adaptation in metapopulations.’ The book covers a diverse array of topics, including group selection, family selection, kin selection and sexual selection, as well as speciation genetics, maternal and paternal genetic effects, and host-symbiont co-evolution. These topics are addressed using a combination of conceptual, theoretical, field and laboratory studies and a diversity of living systems ranging from the laboratory model of flour beetles in the genus, Tribolium, to willow leaf beetles, to other animals, plants and microbes.

Between 1949 and 1955, the State Department pushed for an international fisheries policy grounded in maximum sustainable yield (MSY). The concept is based on a confidence that scientists can predict, theoretically, the largest catch that can be taken from a species’ stock over an indefinite period. And while it was modified in 1996 with passage of the Sustained Fisheries Act, MSY is still at the heart of modern American fisheries management. As fish populations continue to crash, however, it is clear that MSY is itself not sustainable. Indeed, the concept has been widely criticized by scientists for ignoring several key factors in fisheries management and has led to the devastating collapse of many fisheries. This book reveals that the fallibility of MSY lies at its very inception—as a tool of government rather than science. The foundational doctrine of the MSY emerged at a time when the US government was using science to promote and transfer Western knowledge and technology, and to ensure that American ships and planes would have free passage through the world’s seas and skies. The author charts the history of US fisheries science using MSY as her focus, and in particular its application to halibut, tuna, and salmon fisheries. Fish populations the world over are threatened, and this book will help sound warnings of the effect of any management policies divested from science itself.

Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia. Their ivory has been sought after and treasured in most cultures, and they have delighted zoo and circus audiences worldwide for centuries. But it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that people started to take an interest in elephants in the wild, and some of the most important studies of these intelligent giants have been conducted at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. This book provides a summation of what has been learned from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project—the longest continuously running elephant research project in the world. It presents more than three decades of uninterrupted study of over 2,500 individual elephants, from newborn calves to adult bulls to old matriarchs in their 60s. Chapters explore such topics as elephant ecosystems, genetics, communication, social behavior, and reproduction, as well as new developments from the study of elephant minds and cognition. The book closes with a view to the future, making arguments for the ethical treatment of elephants and suggestions to aid in their conservation.

Galileo wrote that “nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones”—a statement that wonderfully captures a long-standing scientific fascination with body size. Why are organisms the size that they are? And what determines their optimum size? This volume explores animal body size from a macroecological perspective, examining species, populations, and other large groups of animals in order to uncover the patterns and causal mechanisms of body size throughout time and across the globe. The chapters represent diverse scientific perspectives and are divided into two sections. The first includes chapters on insects, snails, birds, bats, and terrestrial mammals and discusses the body size patterns of these various organisms. The second examines some of the factors behind, and consequences of, body size patterns and includes chapters on community assembly, body mass distribution, life history, and the influence of flight on body size.

Ask anyone who has owned a pet and they will assure you that, yes, animals have personalities. And science is beginning to agree. Researchers have demonstrated that both domesticated and nondomesticated animals—from invertebrates to monkeys and apes—behave in consistently different ways, meeting the criteria for what many define as personality. But why the differences, and how are personalities shaped by genes and environment? How did they evolve? The essays in this book reveal that there is much to learn from our furred and feathered friends. The study of animal personality is one of the fastest-growing areas of research in behavioral and evolutionary biology. Here the authors, along with a host of scholars from fields as diverse as ecology, genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, and psychology, provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on animal personality. Grouped into thematic sections, chapters approach the topic with empirical and theoretical material, and show that to fully understand why personality exists, we must consider the evolutionary processes which give rise to personality, the ecological correlates of personality differences, and the physiological mechanisms underlying personality variation.

Today, many zoos promote the preservation of biodiversity as a significant part of their mission. As “arks” for endangered species and, increasingly, as leaders in field conservation projects such as the reintroduction of zoo-born animals to the wild, they’re preparing to play an even more important role in attempts to save species in this century. The intensification of these efforts, however, presents a number of practical and strategic challenges for zoos and aquariums as they seek to balance an expanding conservation mission alongside their more traditional recreation and entertainment pursuits. It also raises important questions about the science, values, and historical traditions informing a growing zoo and aquarium conservation agenda in the coming decades. The Ark and Beyond is an authoritative, interdisciplinary volume focused on the past, present, and future of zoo and aquarium conservation, emphasizing the intersection of academic and practitioner perspectives. Its contributors, four-dozen in all, are among the most respected scholars and zoo professionals working today; all of whom have offered uniquely informed perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of zoo and aquarium conservation in an age of accelerating social and ecological change. Together, the chapters explore the meaning and significance of conservation practice in and by zoos and aquariums, and consider how a deeper understanding of the traditions feeding into this effort might be absorbed into key discussions in conservation history, life science ethics, zoo biology, animal studies, and related fields.

At dawn on a brutally cold January morning, the author crouched in the icy grandeur of the Teton Range. It had been three years since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone after a sixty-year absence, and members of a wolf pack were approaching a herd of elk. To the author's utter shock, the elk ignored the wolves as they went in for the kill. The brutal attack that followed—swift and bloody—led him to hypothesize that after only six decades, the elk had forgotten to fear a species that had survived by eating them for hundreds of millennia. The author's fieldwork that frigid day raised important questions that would require years of travel and research to answer: Can naive animals avoid extinction when they encounter reintroduced carnivores? To what extent is fear culturally transmitted? And how can a better understanding of current predator-prey behavior help demystify past extinctions and inform future conservation? This book is the chronicle of the author's search for answers. From Yellowstone's elk and wolves to rhinos living with African lions and moose coexisting with tigers and bears in Asia, the author tracks cultures of fear in animals across continents and climates, engaging readers with a combination of natural history, personal experience, and conservation.

This book provides a resource on the biological and physiological characteristics of the cartilaginous fishes: sharks, rays, and chimaeras. In sixteen chapters, the book covers a broad spectrum of topics, including taxonomy, morphology, ecology, and physiology. For example, it explains the body design of sharks and why the ridged, toothlike denticles that cover their entire bodies are present on only part of the rays' bodies and are absent from those of chimaeras. Another chapter explores the anatomy of the jaws and the role of the muscles and teeth in jaw extension, seizure, and handling of prey.

In recent decades, hundreds of millions of acres of militarized landscapes around the world have transitioned to new purposes of wildlife conservation. These land use changes offer valuable opportunities for new approaches to environmental protection, but also carry cautionary lessons about military impacts, historical erasure, and how to guide ecological restoration in landscapes with complex cultural and natural histories. This book examines a number of these sites, ranging from relatively unknown wildlife refuges in the United States to internationally-renowned areas such as the Iron Curtain borderlands of Europe and the Demilitarized Zone of the Korean Peninsula. These emerging sites of conservation must accomplish seemingly antithetical aims: rebuilding and protecting ecosystems, or restoring life, while also commemorating the historical and cultural legacies of warfare and militarization. The book examines how military activities, conservation goals, and ecological restoration efforts come together - at times disconcertingly - to create new kinds of places and foster new kinds of relationships between humans and the environment.

The vertebrate fossil record extends back more than 500 million years, and bonebeds—localized concentrations of the skeletal remains of vertebrate animals—help unlock the secrets of this long history. Often spectacularly preserved, bonebeds—both modern and ancient—can reveal more about life histories, ecological associations, and preservation patterns than any single skeleton or bone. For this reason, they are frequently studied by paleobiologists, geologists, and archeologists seeking to piece together the vertebrate record. In this book, thirteen researchers combine their experiences to provide readers with workable definitions, theoretical frameworks, and a compendium of modern techniques in bonebed data collection and analysis. By addressing the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of bonebed research, they provide the background and methods that students and professionals need to explore and understand these records of ancient life and death.

As explorers and scientists have known for decades, the Neotropics harbor a fantastic array of our planet's mammalian diversity, from capybaras and capuchins to maned wolves and mouse opossums to sloths and sakis. This biological bounty can be attributed partly to the striking diversity of Neotropical landscapes and climates and partly to a series of continental connections that permitted intermittent faunal exchanges with Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and North America. Thus, to comprehend the development of modern Neotropical mammal faunas requires not only mastery of the Neotropics' substantial diversity, but also knowledge of mammalian lineages and landscapes dating back to the Mesozoic. This book offers an exploration of the development and relationships of the modern mammal fauna through a series of studies that encompass the last 100 million years and both Central and South America. This work serves as a complement to more taxonomically driven works, providing for readers the long geologic and biogeographic contexts that undergird the abundance and diversity of Neotropical mammals. Rather than documenting diversity or distribution, this collection traverses the patterns that the distributions and relationships across mammal species convey, bringing together geology, paleobiology, systematics, mammalogy, and biogeography.

In the years since the 9/11 attacks—and the subsequent lethal anthrax letters—the United States has spent billions of dollars on measures to defend the population against the threat of biological weapons. But as this book argues, all that money and effort hasn't made us any safer—in fact, it has made us more vulnerable. The book reveals the mistakes made to this point and lays out the necessary steps to set us on the path toward true biosecurity. The fundamental problem with the current approach, according to the book, is the danger caused by the sheer size and secrecy of our biodefense effort. Thousands of scientists spread throughout hundreds of locations are now working with lethal bioweapons agents—but their inability to make their work public causes suspicion among our enemies and allies alike, even as the enormous number of laboratories greatly multiplies the inherent risk of deadly accidents or theft. Meanwhile, vital public health needs go unmet because of this new biodefense focus. True biosecurity, the chapters argue, will require a multipronged effort based in an understanding of the complexity of the issue, guided by scientific ethics, and watched over by a vigilant citizenry attentive to the difference between fear mongering and true analysis of risk.

This book provides an introduction to coevolution in both microevolutionary (ecological) and macroevolutionary (historical) time. It emphasizes the integration of cophylogenetic, comparative, and experimental approaches for testing coevolutionary hypotheses. Recent work in coevolutionary biology has been successful in demonstrating coadaptation between species in response to reciprocal selection. Fewer studies have tested the influence of coadaptation on the diversification of interacting taxa. We review studies that have attempted to do just this. The overriding question addressed is “how do ecological interactions influence patterns of codiversification?”. We focus on the coevolution of interacting species, particularly those involving external parasites that live on hosts. Such parasites include a diverse assemblage of organisms, ranging from herbivorous insects on plants, to monogenean worms on fish, to feather lice on birds. Ectoparasites are powerful models for studies of coevolution because they are easy to observe, mark, and count. Many of the examples in the book involve parasitic lice of birds and mammals. Lice and their hosts are unusually tractable systems for studies that attempt to integrate coevolutionary ecology and history. Some chapters in the book are very broad in scope, introducing coevolutionary concepts that apply to all interacting species. Other chapters are more narrowly focused on the biology and coevolution of lice and their hosts. The overall goal of the book is to integrate coevolutionary concepts with examples of empirical tests of coevolutionary theory in micro- and macro-evolutionary time. The book concludes with a framework for better integration of coadaptation and codiversification.

This book is an attempt to describe cognitive ecology, which focuses on the ecology and evolution of “cognition,” defined as the neuronal processes concerned with the acquisition, retention, and use of information. It presents new work on established and emergent research programs relating cognition to avian ecology. The authors find that, with few exceptions, all animals have to make decisions within the four general categories of feeding, predator avoidance, interactions with competitors, and sexual behavior. Few chapters of the book focus on cognitive aspects of decisions made within two of these behavioral categories of reproduction and antipredator behavior. Not much attention has been devoted to cognition at the embryonic stage, but recent experiments reviewed by the authors clearly indicate that embryos possess sophisticated abilities to assess and respond to cues of predation. The book also discusses the social information, social learning, and integrating knowledge about animals' natural behavior, ecology, and evolutionary history with the powerful empirical techniques of experimental psychology.

As our world becomes increasingly urbanized, an understanding of the context, mechanisms, and consequences of city and suburban environments becomes more critical. Without a sense of what open spaces such as parks and gardens contribute, it is difficult to argue for their creation and maintenance: in the face of schools needing resources, roads and sewers needing maintenance, and people suffering at the hands of others, why should cities and counties spend scarce dollars planting trees and preserving parks? This book demonstrates the value of urban green. Focusing specifically on the role of vegetation and trees, the book shows the costs and benefits reaped from urban open spaces, from cooler temperatures to better quality ground water—and why it all matters. While this book is a work of science, it does not ignore the social component. The book looks at low-income areas that have poor vegetation, and shows how enhancing these areas through the planting of community gardens and trees can alleviate social ills.

The first book to deal in an integrated manner the full range of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems that occur in Costa Rica, Costa Rican Ecosystems provides an overview of Costa Rica’s main ecosystems by compiling information about their physical settings, biogeography, species diversity, and much more. Rather than follow a technical or clinical approach with a hierarchical categorization of ecosystems, Costa Rica’s dense ecology is explored in a “journey-wise” sequence that provides familiarity and understanding of the country’s full, varied range of intergrading seascapes and landscapes. The book begins with three introductory chapters focusing on Costa Rica’s climate, geology, and soils to provide an understanding of the medium in which its ecology has developed, and then proceeds with a presentation of each of the country’s ecosystems. These chapters review the research to provide a detailed description of each ecosystem, from its location, extent, and general function, to its characteristic species and the ways in which these species interact. The authors provide a summary of the effects that humans have had on the environment in each case, as well as the history, challenges, and successes of the relevant conservation efforts. This book, a culmination of decades of scientific achievement and experience, provides an intellectual template upon which sustainability can be built for Costa Rica and a model for an ecosystems overview that all nations should aspire to and emulate.

A quorum of scientists, conducting field and laboratory research on orchid pollination in eleven countries, offer reviews and results to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of On The Various Contrivances By Which British And Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised By Insects, And On The Good Effects Of Intercrossing (1862). Authors of the first ten chapters follow research on the pollination and breeding systems of the same orchid lineages that interested Darwin, including temperate and tropical species. Authors on the last two chapters provide information on the floral attractants and flowering systems of orchids using protocols and technologies unavailable during Darwin’s lifetime. The functional structure of orchid flowers, the chemistry of their fragrances, the behaviour of their pollinators, the effects of seasonal changes on flowering periods, and the role of genetics in determining their genealogy are addressed to show how the study of orchid evolution has expanded and diversified since Darwin (1862, 1877). As so many orchid species are currently threatened or endangered, conservation issues are discussed in terms of reproductive success.

In this book, author Jane C. Desmond offers a performative analysis of the social phenomena that construct human-animal relations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Desmond explores the shared conditions of embodiment and physical copresence that shape human relationships with animals. She begins by examining human interactions with the bodies of non-individuated animals, including museum exhibitions of dead animals and taxidermy displays. Desmond uses the Body Worlds exhibit of plasticized human corpses as a point of contrast to argue that while human corpses are put on display in a way that emphasizes their universality, exhibits featuring dead animal bodies invite genericization. The following sections of the book deal with known or individuated animals such as pets. Desmond analyzes animal burial and mourning practices, paying special attention to pet obituaries and pet cemeteries, and discusses the underlying implications of cross-species kinship. She compares these grieving practices to humans’ uncompassionate treatment of animal roadkill. In the last part of the book, Desmond explores the marketing of animal intimacy, in particular the marketing of artwork created by animals. She focuses on the body traces left by animal artists as well as the distinction between primates and other animals that make art. Ultimately, Desmond uses these various examples to question the complicated politics of human-animal relations and interactions.

The comparative physiology of seemingly disparate organisms often serves as a surprising pathway to biological enlightenment. This book sheds new light on the remarkable physiology of diving seals through comparison with members of our own species on quests toward enlightenment: meditating yogis. As the text reveals, survival in extreme conditions such as those faced by seals is often not about running for cover or coming up for air, but rather about working within the confines of an environment and suppressing normal bodily function. Animals in this withdrawn state display reduced resting metabolic rates and are temporarily less dependent upon customary levels of oxygen. For diving seals—creatures especially well-adapted to prolonged submergence in the ocean's cold depths—such periods of rest lengthen dive endurance. But while human divers share modest, brief adjustments of suppressed metabolism with diving seals, it is the practiced response achieved during deep meditation that is characterized by metabolic rates well below normal levels, sometimes even approaching those of non-exercising diving seals. And the comparison does not end here: hibernating animals, infants during birth, near-drowning victims, and clams at low tide all also display similarly reduced metabolisms.

Why do species live where they live? What determines the abundance and diversity of species in a given area? What role do species play in the functioning of entire ecosystems? All of these questions share a single core concept—the ecological niche. Although the niche concept has fallen into disfavor among ecologists in recent years, this book argues that the niche is an ideal tool with which to unify disparate research and theoretical approaches in contemporary ecology. The authors define the niche as including both what an organism needs from its environment and how that organism's activities shape its environment. Drawing on the theory of consumer–resource interactions, as well as its graphical analysis, they develop a framework for understanding niches that is flexible enough to include a variety of small- and large-scale processes, from resource competition, predation, and stress to community structure, biodiversity, and ecosystem function.