An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology PDF Download

Author: Nicholas B. Davies
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444314025
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
The third edition of this successful textbook looks again at the influence of natural selection on behavior - an animal's struggle to survive by exploiting resources, avoiding predators, and maximizing reproductive success. In this edition, new examples are introduced throughout, many illustrated with full color photographs. In addition, important new topics are added including the latest techniques of comparative analysis, the theory and application of DNA fingerprinting techniques, extensive new discussion on brood parasite/host coevolution, the latest ideas on sexual selection in relation to disease resistance, and a new section on the intentionality of communication. Written in the lucid style for which these two authors are renowned, the text is enhanced by boxed sections illustrating important concepts and new marginal notes that guide the reader through the text. This book will be essential reading for students taking courses in behavioral ecology. The leading introductory text from the two most prominent workers in the field. Second colour in the text. New section of four colour plates. Boxed sections to ilustrate difficult and important points. New larger format with marginal notes to guide the reader through the text. Selected further reading at the end of each chapter.

Author: David Westneat
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195331931
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 661

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Book Description
Evolutionary Behavioral Ecology presents a comprehensive treatment of theevolutionary and ecological processes shaping behavior across a wide array of organisms and a diverse set of behaviors and is suitable as a graduate-level text and as a sourcebook for professional scientists.

Author: David W. Stephens
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226772659
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
Foraging is fundamental to animal survival and reproduction, yet it is much more than a simple matter of finding food; it is a biological imperative. Animals must find and consume resources to succeed, and they make extraordinary efforts to do so. For instance, pythons rarely eat, but when they do, their meals are large—as much as 60 percent larger than their own bodies. The snake’s digestive system is normally dormant, but during digestion metabolic rates can increase fortyfold. A python digesting quietly on the forest floor has the metabolic rate of thoroughbred in a dead heat. This and related foraging processes have broad applications in ecology, cognitive science, anthropology, and conservation biology—and they can be further extrapolated in economics, neurobiology, and computer science. Foraging is the first comprehensive review of the topic in more than twenty years. A monumental undertaking, this volume brings together twenty-two experts from throughout the field to offer the latest on the mechanics of foraging, modern foraging theory, and foraging ecology. The fourteen essays cover all the relevant issues, including cognition, individual behavior, caching behavior, parental behavior, antipredator behavior, social behavior, population and community ecology, herbivory, and conservation. Considering a wide range of taxa, from birds to mammals to amphibians, Foraging will be the definitive guide to the field.

Author: Thomas P. Quinn
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774842431
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The Behavior and Ecology of Pacific Salmon and Trout explains the patterns of mate choice, the competition for nest sites, and the fate of the salmon after their death. It describes the lives of offspring during the months they spend incubating in gravel, growing in fresh water, and migrating out to sea to mature. This thorough, up-to-date survey should be on the shelf of everyone with a professional or personal interest in Pacific salmon and trout. Written in a technically accurate but engaging style, it will appeal to a wide range of readers, including students, anglers, biologists, conservationists, legislators, and armchair naturalists.

Author: Eric Alden Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351521314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
""à required reading for anyone interested in the economy, ecology, and demography of human societies."" --American Journal of Human Biology ""This excellent book can serve both as a text¼book and as a scholarly reference."" --American Scientist

Author: Lee Alan Dugatkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691207240
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A key way that behavioral ecologists develop general theories of animal behavior is by studying one species or a closely related group of species--''model systems''--over a long period. This book brings together some of the field's most respected researchers to describe why they chose their systems, how they integrate theoretical, conceptual, and empirical work, lessons for the practice of the discipline, and potential avenues of future research. Their model systems encompass a wide range of animals and behavioral issues, from dung flies to sticklebacks, dolphins to African wild dogs, from foraging to aggression, territoriality to reproductive suppression. Model Systems in Behavioral Ecology offers an unprecedented ''systems'' focus and revealing insights into the confluence of personal curiosity and scientific inquiry. It will be an invaluable text for behavioral ecology courses and a helpful overview--and a preview of coming developments--for advanced researchers. The twenty-five chapters are divided into four sections: insects and arachnids, amphibians and reptiles, birds, and mammals. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Geoff A. Parker, Thomas D. Seeley, Naomi Pierce, Kern Reeve, Gerald S. Wilkinson, Bert Hölldobler and Flavio Roces, George W. Uetz, Michael J. Ryan and Gil Rosenthal, Judy Stamps, H. Carl Gerhardt, Barry Sinervo, Robert Warner, Manfred Milinski, David F. Westneat, Alan C. Kamil and Alan B. Bond, Paul Sherman, Jerram L. Brown, Anders Pape Møller, Marc Bekoff, Richard C. Connor, Joan B. Silk, Christopher Boesch, Scott Creel, A.H. Harcourt, and Tim Caro and M. J. Kelly.

Author: Karen B. Strier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317345207
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Primate Behavioral Ecology, described as “an engaging, cutting-edge exposition,” incorporates exciting new discoveries and the most up-to-date approaches in its introduction to the field and its applications of behavioral ecology to primate conservation. This unique, comprehensive, single-authored text integrates the basics of evolutionary, ecological, and demographic perspectives with contemporary noninvasive molecular and hormonal techniques to understand how different primates behave and the significance of these insights for primate conservation. Examples are drawn from the “classic” primate field studies and more recent studies on previously neglected species from across the primate order, illustrating the vast behavioral variation that we now know exists and the gaps in our knowledge that future studies will fill.

Author: John L. Gittleman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745816
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
The mammalian order Carnivora is characterized by an incredible range of morphological, ecological, and behavioral variation. Carnivores can be as small as the 100-gram least weasel or as large as the 800-kilogram polar bear. Their reproductive rate can vary from one offspring every five years, as with some black bears, to three litters a year, as with the dwarf mongoose. Group sizes can be traced along a wide continuum, from the solitary ermine to the monogamous golden jackal to the large extended packs of as many as 80 spotted hyenas. Until recently the general habits of most wild carnivore species were inadequately understood. In the last decade, however, improved technologies, including the use of radiotelemetry and night-vision scopes, have led to many important discoveries. This book is at once a critical summary and an evaluation of current research on carnivores. A worthy successor to R.F. Ewer's monumental volume, The Carnivores (Cornell University Press), it is the work of 30 leading carnivore biologists, who here assemble comparative data on the basic anatomical, behavioral, ecological, physiological, reproductive, and evolutionary characteristics of this group. After a general introduction to the Carnivora, the volume is divided in three parts, each of which begins with a brief introduction outlining its main themes. Part I, Behavior, covers acoustic and olfactory communication, behavioral development, behavioral ecology of canids and hyaenids, modes of solitary living, and group living. In Part II, Ecology, topics include feeding ecology of the giant panda and Asiatic black bear, adatpations for aquatic living, ecological constraints on predation in felids, consequences of small size in mustelids, rate of basal metabolism and food habits, and reproductive output. Part III, Evolution, deals with the morphological approaches to phylogeny, and the fossil record. An appendix presents a complete classification of the Carnivora, including topics of continuing controversy. Highlighting recent developments in the study of the Carnivora and areas for further research, this broad synthesis will be of great value of students and researchers in animal behavior, behavioral ecology, wildlife ecology, mammalogy, paleontology, systematics, and evolution theory. It will also encourage realistic conservation programs to manage rapidly diminishing populations and will elucidate particular features of the carnivores for nonspecialist readers.

Author: Marc Mangel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691206961
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book describes a powerful and flexible technique for the modeling of behavior, based on evolutionary principles. The technique employs stochastic dynamic programming and permits the analysis of behavioral adaptations wherein organisms respond to changes in their environment and in their own current physiological state. Models can be constructed to reflect sequential decisions concerned simultaneously with foraging, reproduction, predator avoidance, and other activities. The authors show how to construct and use dynamic behavioral models. Part I covers the mathematical background and computer programming, and then uses a paradigm of foraging under risk of predation to exemplify the general modeling technique. Part II consists of five "applied" chapters illustrating the scope of the dynamic modeling approach. They treat hunting behavior in lions, reproduction in insects, migrations of aquatic organisms, clutch size and parental care in birds, and movement of spiders and raptors. Advanced topics, including the study of dynamic evolutionarily stable strategies, are discussed in Part III.

Author: Douglas J. Kennett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520932455
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This innovative volume is the first collective effort by archaeologists and ethnographers to use concepts and models from human behavioral ecology to explore one of the most consequential transitions in human history: the origins of agriculture. Carefully balancing theory and detailed empirical study, and drawing from a series of ethnographic and archaeological case studies from eleven locations—including North and South America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East, Africa, and the Pacific—the contributors to this volume examine the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding using a broad set of analytical models and concepts. These include diet breadth, central place foraging, ideal free distribution, discounting, risk sensitivity, population ecology, and costly signaling. An introductory chapter both charts the basics of the theory and notes areas of rapid advance in our understanding of how human subsistence systems evolve. Two concluding chapters by senior archaeologists reflect on the potential for human behavioral ecology to explain domestication and the transition from foraging to farming.