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Anthropogenic climate change is the defining environmental challenge of this century, posing an existential threat not only to humans but also to the vast array of plants and animals that inhabit our planet. Among these, insects reign as the largest and most diverse group of organisms, playing critical roles in nutrient cycling, pollination, seed dispersal, and population control of other species. Additionally, they serve as a vital food source for various taxa and act as vectors for numerous human diseases. This comprehensive but accessible text delves into the intricate world of these remarkable creatures, with a focus extending beyond economically or medically significant species to encom...
Insects display a staggering diversity of behaviors. Studying these systems provides insights into a wide range of ecological, evolutionary, and behavioral questions including the genetics of behavior, phenotypic plasticity, chemical communication, and the evolution of life-history traits. This accessible text offers a new approach that provides the reader with the necessary theoretical and conceptual foundations, at different hierarchical levels, to understand insect behavior. The book is divided into three main sections: mechanisms, ecological and evolutionary consequences, and applied issues. The final section places the preceding chapters within a framework of current threats to human survival - climate change, disease, and food security - before providing suggestions and insights as to how we can utilize an understanding of insect behavior to control and/or ameliorate them. Each chapter provides a concise, authoritative review of the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological foundations of each topic.
Insects display a staggering diversity of behaviors. Studying these systems provides insights into a wide range of ecological, evolutionary, and behavioral questions including the genetics of behavior, phenotypic plasticity, chemical communication, and the evolution of life-history traits. This accessible text offers a new approach that provides the reader with the necessary theoretical and conceptual foundations, at different hierarchical levels, to understand insect behavior. The book is divided into three main sections: mechanisms, ecological and evolutionary consequences, and applied issues. The final section places the preceding chapters within a framework of current threats to human survival - climate change, disease, and food security - before providing suggestions and insights as to how we can utilize an understanding of insect behavior to control and/or ameliorate them. Each chapter provides a concise, authoritative review of the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological foundations of each topic.
This book provides a modern, synthetic overview of interactions between insects and their environments from a physiological perspective that integrates information across a range of approaches and scales. It shows that evolved physiological responses at the individual level are translated into coherent physiological and ecological patterns at larger, even global scales. This is done by examining in detail the ways in which insects obtain resources from the environment, process these resources in various ways, and turn the results into energy which allows them to regulate their internal environment as well as cope with environmental extremes of temperature and water availability. The book dem...
From emails to social media, from instant messaging to political memes, the way we produce and transmit culture is radically changing. Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age examines, for the first time in a cognitive and evolutionary perspective, the impact of online and digital media on how we produce and transmit culture.
Dragonflies and Damselflies documents the latest advances in odonate biology and relates these to a broader ecological and evolutionary research agenda. Despite being one of the smallest insect orders, dragonflies offer a number of advantages for both laboratory and field studies. In fact, they have been crucial to the advancement of our understanding of insect ecology and evolution. This book provides a critical summary of the major advances in these fields. Contributions from many of the leading researchers in dragonfly biology offer new perspectives and paradigms as well as additional, unpublished, data. The editor has carefully assembled a mix of theoretical and applied chapters (includi...
Written for students who have completed an introductory course in biology, the fourth edition of Daly and Doyen's Introduction to Insect Biology and Diversity presents the ideal balance of basic biological principles and in-depth treatment of insect classification, including keys for identifying more than four hundred families. In this fourth edition, James B. Whitfield, of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, continues as lead author, bringing a wealth of expertise on molecular analysis relating to development and systematics.
"A Better Ape explores the evolution of the moral mind from our ancestors with chimpanzees, through the origins of our genus and our species, to the development of behaviorally modern humans who underwent revolutions in agriculture, urbanization, and industrial technology. The book begins, in Part I, by explaining the biological evolution of sympathy and loyalty in great apes and trust and respect in the earliest humans. These moral emotions are the first element of the moral mind. Part II explains the gene-culture co-evolution of norms, emotions, and reasoning in Homo sapiens. Moral norms of harm, kinship, reciprocity, autonomy, and fairness are the second element of the moral mind. A socia...
Microbial ecology is the study of interactions among microbes in natural environments and their roles in biogeochemical cycles, food web dynamics, and the evolution of life. Microbes are the most numerous organisms in the biosphere and mediate many critical reactions in elemental cycles and biogeochemical reactions. Because microbes are essential players in the carbon cycle and related processes, microbial ecology is a vital science for understanding the role of the biosphere in global warming and the response of natural ecosystems to climate change. This novel textbook discusses the major processes carried out by viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and other protists - the microbes - in fres...
Changes in the environment drive evolution, and evidence suggests that our ancestors evolved to use cultural adaptations to survive environmental fluctuations of great severity. In A Story of Us, Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson explain the evidence and ideas that provide an account of how they coped, using short descriptive stories to illustrate life at different stages of our evolutionary history.