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The impact of bees on the world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They’ve painted landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities and have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment. The biology of the honey bee is one that reflects their role in transforming environments with their anatomical adaptations and a complex language that together function to exploit floral resources. A complex social system that includes a division of labor builds, defends, and provisions nests containing tens of thousands of individuals, only one of whom reproduces. Traditional biology texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last. This book presents fundamental biology not in layers but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept. It examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves, and the mating behavior of the queen.

The book presents a novel strategy for addressing the major environmental and social problems of our time. It emphasizes transformative actions by individual citizens, both ordinary and extraordinary, rather than by government and other groups. It empowers a spectrum of solutions appropriate to people with varying interests, skills, political persuasions, and level of environmental and social commitment. The book draws on social and ecological theory to formulate a four-tiered stewardship strategy to transform communities, nations, and the planet. Key elements of this strategy are (1) individual actions that link people with nature and reduce human impacts on the planet, (2) effective communication to reduce political polarization and share solutions, (3) collaborations that integrate actions of multiple groups, and (4) political engagement to trigger needed transformations. The book builds on diverse visions and goals for the future of ecosystems and society: concern for future generations, a spiritual commitment to care for Creation and vulnerable people, a desire to sustain the best of nature and of cultures, and a concern about the security and well-being of communities, nations, and the world. This is not a book about what should be done. It is a book about what has been and can be done and a pragmatic strategy for tangible progress.

DNA, once the exclusive domain of scientists in research labs, is now the darling of popular and social media. With personal genetic testing kits in homes and genetically modified organism (GMO) foods in stores, DNA is an increasingly familiar term. Unfortunately, what people know, or think they know, about DNA and genetics is often confused or incorrect. Contrary to popular belief, for instance, genes don’t “skip a generation” and, no, human DNA is not “different” from DNA of other species. With such popular misconceptions proliferating in the news and on the internet, how can anyone sort fact from fiction? DNA Demystified satisfies the public appetite for and curiosity about DNA and genetics. Alan McHughen, an accomplished academic and public science advocate, brings the reader up-to-speed on what we know, what we don’t, and where genetic technologies are taking us. The book begins with the basic groundwork and a brief history of DNA and genetics. Chapters then cover newsworthy topics, including DNA fingerprinting, using DNA in forensic analyses, and identifying cold-case criminals. For readers intrigued by the proliferation of at-home DNA tests, the text includes fascinating explorations of genetic genealogy and family tree construction—crucial for people seeking their biological ancestry. Other chapters describe genetic engineering in medicine and pharmaceuticals, and the use of those same technologies in creating the far more controversial GMOs in food and agriculture. Throughout, the book raises provocative ethical and privacy issues arising from DNA and genetic technologies.

This book focuses on the emerging scientific discipline of astrobiology, exploring the humanistic issues of this multidisciplinary field. To be sure, there are myriad scientific questions that astrobiologists have only begun to address. However, this is not a purely scientific enterprise. More research on the broader social and conceptual aspects of astrobiology is needed. Just what are our ethical obligations toward different sorts of alien life? Should we attempt to communicate with life beyond our planet? What is “life” in the most general sense? The current volume addresses these questions by looking at different perspectives from philosophers, historians, theologians, social scientists, and legal scholars. It sets a benchmark for future work in astrobiology, giving readers the groundwork from which to base the continuous scholarship coming from this ever-growing scientific field.

This book continues the authoritative and established edited series of theoretical ecology books initiated by Robert May which helped pave the way for ecology to become a more robust theoretical science, encouraging the modern biologist to better understand the mathematics behind their theories. This latest instalment in the Theoretical Ecology series builds on the legacy of its predecessors with a completely new set of contributions. Rather than placing emphasis on the historical ideas in theoretical ecology, the editors have encouraged each contribution to: i) synthesize historical theoretical ideas within modern frameworks that have emerged in the last ten to twenty years (e.g., bridging population interactions to whole food webs); ii) describe novel theory that has emerged in the last twenty years from historical empirical areas (e.g., macro-ecology); and iii) cover the booming area of theoretical ecological applications (e.g., disease theory and global change theory). The result is a forward-looking synthesis that will help guide the field through a further decade of development and discovery.

Cities occupy about 3 per cent of the Earth’s habitable land area and are home to one out of two humans worldwide; both estimates are predicted to grow. Urban space is thus becoming an important, novel ecological niche for humans and wildlife alike. Building on knowledge gathered by urban ecologists during the last half century, evidence of evolutionary responses to urbanization has rapidly emerged. Urban evolutionary biology is a nascent yet fast-growing field of research—and a fascinating testing ground for evolutionary biologists worldwide. Urbanization offers a great range of opportunities to examine evolutionary processes because of the radically altered and easily quantifiable urban habitat, and the large number of cities worldwide, enabling rigorous, replicated tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Urban populations are increasingly exhibiting both neutral and adaptive evolutionary changes at levels ranging from genotypes to phenotypes. The novelty of urban evolutionary biology is that these changes are driven by the cities we have built, including effects of infrastructure, pollution, and social characteristics of our urban neighbourhoods. It will thereby enrich the field of evolutionary biology with emergent yet incredibly potent new research themes where the urban habitat is key. In a series of sixteen chapters written by leading evolutionary biologists working on urban drivers of evolution, Urban Evolutionary Biology is the first academic book in the field. It synthesizes current knowledge on evolutionary processes occurring literally on our doorstep, across the globe, and in each city independently.

The excavations at Sterkfontein Cave, Gauteng Province, South Africa, have yielded one of the largest collections of postcranial fossils of any hominin site. These fossils remain relatively unstudied, and few published comprehensively, despite the enormous potential of these fossils for answering questions about Australopithecus africanus paleobiology, early hominin variation, and early human evolution. This volume presents photographs, anatomical descriptions and analyses for all Sterkfontein hominin postcranial fossils that were available for study in 2009, when an international workshop of experts was convened at University of the Witwatersrand to discuss and study this material. The chapters in this volume represent a foundation for further investigations with which to interpret these and other fossils from Sterkfontein, and from all over Africa, that will be recovered in years to come.

In social animals, perturbations may trigger specific behavioural responses with consequences for dispersal and complex population dynamics. Perturbations raise the need for information gathering in order to reduce uncertainty and increase resilience. Updated information is then shared within the group and social behaviours emerge as a self-organized process. This social information factoralizes with the size of the group, and it is finally used for making crucial decisions about, for instance, when to leave the patch and where to go. Indeed, evolution has favoured philopatry over dispersal, and this trade-off is challenged by perturbations. When perturbations accumulate over time, they may decrease the suitability of the patch and erode the philopatric state until crossing a tipping point, beyond which most individuals decide to disperse to better areas. Initially, the decision to disperse is led by a few individuals, and this decision is copied by the rest of the group in an autocatalytic way. This feedback process of social copying is termed runaway dispersal. Furthermore, social copying enhances the evolution of cultural and technological innovation, which may cause additional nonlinearities for population dynamics. Social information gathering and social copying have also occurred in human evolution, especially after perturbations such as climate extremes and warfare. In summary, social feedback processes cause nonlinear population dynamics including hysteresis and critical transitions (from philopatry to patch collapses and invasions), which emerge from the collective behaviour of large ensembles of individuals.

Whether through loss of habitat or cascading community effects, diseases can shape the very nature of the marine environment. Despite their significant impacts, studies of marine diseases have tended to lag behind their terrestrial equivalents, particularly with regards to their ecological effects. However, in recent decades global research focused on marine disease ecology has expanded at an accelerating rate. This is due in part to increases in disease emergence across many taxa, but it can also be attributed to a broader realization that the parasites responsible for disease are themselves important members of marine communities. Understanding their ecological relationships with the environment and their hosts is critical to understanding, conserving, and managing natural and exploited populations, communities, and ecosystems. Courses on marine disease ecology are now starting to emerge and this first textbook in the field will be ideally placed to serve them. Marine Disease Ecology is suitable for graduate students and researchers in the fields of marine disease ecology, aquaculture, fisheries, veterinary science, evolution, and conservation. It will also be of relevance and use to a broader interdisciplinary audience of government agencies, NGOs, and marine resource managers.

Clinicians and scientists are increasingly recognising the importance of an evolutionary perspective in studying the aetiology, prevention, and treatment of human disease; the growing prominence of genetics in medicine is further adding to the interest in evolutionary medicine. In spite of this, too few medical students or residents study evolution. This book builds a compelling case for integrating evolutionary biology into undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, as well as its intrinsic value to medicine. Chapter by chapter, the authors – experts in anthropology, biology, ecology, physiology, public health, and various disciplines of medicine – present the rationale for clinically-relevant evolutionary thinking. They achieve this within the broader context of medicine but through the focused lens of maternal and child health, with an emphasis on female reproduction and the early-life biochemical, immunological, and microbial responses influenced by evolution. The tightly woven and accessible narrative illustrates how a medical education that considers evolved traits can deepen our understanding of the complexities of the human body, variability in health, susceptibility to disease, and ultimately help guide treatment, prevention, and public health policy. However, integrating evolutionary biology into medical education continues to face several roadblocks. The medical curriculum is already replete with complex subjects and a long period of training. The addition of an evolutionary perspective to this curriculum would certainly seem daunting, and many medical educators express concern over potential controversy if evolution is introduced into the curriculum of their schools. Medical education urgently needs strategies and teaching aids to lower the barriers to incorporating evolution into medical training. In summary, this call to arms makes a strong case for incorporating evolutionary thinking early in medical training to help guide the types of critical questions physicians ask, or should be asking. It will be of relevance and use to evolutionary biologists, physicians, medical students, and biomedical research scientists.

Much is conserved in vertebrate evolution, but significant changes in the nervous system occurred at the origin of vertebrates and in most of the major vertebrate lineages. This book examines these innovations and relates them to evolutionary changes in other organ systems, animal behavior, and ecological conditions at the time. The resulting perspective clarifies what makes the major vertebrate lineages unique and helps explain their varying degrees of ecological success. One of the book’s major conclusions is that vertebrate nervous systems are more diverse than commonly assumed, at least among neurobiologists. Examples of important innovations include not only the emergence of novel brain regions, such as the cerebellum and neocortex, but also major changes in neuronal circuitry and functional organization. A second major conclusion is that many of the apparent similarities in vertebrate nervous systems resulted from convergent evolution, rather than inheritance from a common ancestor. For example, brain size and complexity increased numerous times, in many vertebrate lineages. In conjunction with these changes, olfactory inputs to the telencephalic pallium were reduced in several different lineages, and this reduction was associated with the emergence of pallial regions that process non-olfactory sensory inputs. These conclusions cast doubt on the widely held assumption that all vertebrate nervous systems are built according to a single, common plan. Instead, the book encourages readers to view both species similarities and differences as fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of nervous systems.

The Biology of Agroecosystems provides an introduction to the biological and ecological attributes of ecosystems and the biological impacts of agriculture on the wider environment. Global human populations are rising and diets are becoming ever more complicated, leading to requirements for increased levels of food production. Natural biotopes are becoming increasingly fragmented as agricultural activities expand around them. Agroecosystems occur from the tropics to subarctic environments and comprise systems as varied as annual crops, perennial grasslands, orchards, and agroforestry systems. They presently cover almost 40 per cent of the terrestrial land surface and significantly shape landscapes at a global scale. The book outlines the origin and development of agriculture and summarizes the characteristics of different types of agroecosystems. The conflicts between management of land for productivity and conservation of natural resources are discussed, and some of the key biological issues (loss of biodiversity, instability, susceptibility to pests, for example) are explored. Individual chapters introduce the role of functional groups such as pollinators, nutrient cycling organisms, and pest regulators; the importance of soils and soil organisms for agriculture; and the biological impacts of water use in agroecosystems. Globalization of agriculture is explored, and includes drivers of change, such as shifting diets, and biological challenges, such as the spread of pest species. The final chapters outline different management methods for sustainable management of agroecosystems, and consider the future challenges and opportunities for agriculture and the biology of agroecosystems.

The biological diversity of the planet is being rapidly depleted due to the direct and indirect consequences of human activity. As the size of wild animal and plant populations decreases and fragmentation increases, inbreeding reduces fitness and loss of genetic diversity reduces their ability to adapt to changes in the environment. Many small isolated populations are going extinct unnecessarily. In many cases, such populations can be genetically rescued by gene flow from another population within the species, but this is very rarely done. This book provides a practical guide to the genetic management of fragmented animal and plant populations.

Sensory Transduction provides a thorough and easily accessible introduction to the mechanisms that each of the different kinds of sensory receptor cell uses to convert a sensory stimulus into an electrical response. Beginning with an introduction to methods of experimentation, sensory specializations, ion channels, and G-protein cascades, it provides up-to-date reviews of all of the major senses, including touch, hearing, olfaction, taste, photoreception, and the “extra” senses of thermoreception, electroreception, and magnetoreception. By bringing mechanisms of all of the senses together into a coherent treatment, it facilitates comparison of ion channels, metabotropic effector molecules, second messengers, and other components of signal pathways that are common themes in the physiology of the different sense organs. With its many clear illustrations and easily assimilated exposition, it provides an ideal introduction to current research for the professional in neuroscience, as well as a text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate-level course on sensory physiology.

This book is a quantitative exposition of our current understanding of the dynamics of plant and animal populations, with the goal that readers will be able to understand, and participate in the management of populations in the wild. The book uses mathematical models to establish the basic principles of population behaviour. It begins with a philosophical approach to mathematical models of populations. It then progresses from a description of models with a single variable, abundance, to models that describe changes in the abundance of individuals at each age, then similar models that describe populations in terms of the abundance over size, life stage, and space. The book assumes a knowledge of basic calculus, but explains more advanced mathematical concepts such as partial derivatives, matrices, and random signals, as it makes use of them. The book explains the basis of the principles underlying important population processes, such as the mechanism that allow populations to persist, rather than go extinct, the way in which populations respond to variable environments, and the origin of population cycles.The next two chapters focus on application of the principles of population dynamics to manage for the prevention of extinction, as well as the management of fisheries for sustainable, high yields. The final chapter recapitulates how different population behaviors arise in situations with different levels of density dependence and replacement (the potential lifetime reproduction per individual), and how variability arises at different time scales set by a species’ life history.

The aim of this book is to shed light on one of the most fundamental processes of life in the various lineages of animals: respiration. It provides a certain background on the physiological side of respiration, but it clearly focuses on the morphological aspects. In general, the intention of this book is to illustrate the impressive diversity of respiratory faculties (form–function complexes) rather than serving as an encyclopaedic handbook. It takes the reader on a journey through the entire realm of animals and discusses the structures involved in gas exchange, how they work, and most importantly, how all of this may be connected on an evolutionary scale. Due to the common problem, namely oxygen uptake and carbon dioxide release, and the limited number of solutions, basically surface area, barrier thickness, and physical exchange model of the respiratory organ, it is not surprising that one finds a huge number of convergences. These include, for instance, the repeated origin of tubular tracheae among several lineages of arthropods, similar lung structures in snails and amphibians, and counter-current exchange gills in bivalves and fish. However, there are certain phylogenetic constraints evident and the respiratory faculty appears as a yet to be adequately exploited source of information for systematic considerations. The ultimate goal of this book is to stimulate further research in respiratory biology, because a huge number of questions remain to be tackled on all levels, ranging from molecular through functional to especially the evolutionary aspects.

We present a rigorous but understandable introduction to the field of sampling theory for ecologists and natural resource scientists. Sampling theory concerns itself with development of procedures for random selection of a subset of units, a sample, from a larger finite population, and with how to best use sample data to make scientifically and statistically sound inferences about the population as a whole. The inferences fall into two broad categories: (a) estimation of simple descriptive population parameters, such as means, totals, or proportions, for variables of interest, and (b) estimation of uncertainty associated with estimated parameter values. Although the targets of estimation are few and simple, estimates of means, totals, or proportions see important and often controversial uses in management of natural resources and in fundamental ecological research, but few ecologists or natural resource scientists have formal training in sampling theory. We emphasize the classical design-based approach to sampling in which variable values associated with units are regarded as fixed and uncertainty of estimation arises via various randomization strategies that may be used to select samples. In addition to covering standard topics such as simple random, systematic, cluster, unequal probability (stressing the generality of Horvitz–Thompson estimation), multi-stage, and multi-phase sampling, we also consider adaptive sampling, spatially balanced sampling, and sampling through time, three areas of special importance for ecologists and natural resource scientists. The text is directed to undergraduate seniors, graduate students, and practicing professionals. Problems emphasize application of the theory and R programming in ecological and natural resource settings.

This book explores the geography, ecology, and antiquity of ‘open ecosystems’, which include grasslands, savannas, and shrublands. They occur in climates that can support closed forest ecosystems and often form mosaics with forest patches. With the aid of remote sensing, it is now clear that open ecosystems are a global phenomenon and occur over vast areas in climates that could also support forests. This book goes beyond regional narratives and seeks general explanations for their existence. It develops the theme of open ecosystems as being widespread and ancient, with a distinct biota from that of closed forests. It examines hypotheses for their maintenance in climate zones favouring the development of forests, including soils hostile for tree growth, fire, and vertebrate herbivory.

Climate change issues are attracting rapidly increasing interest from a wide range of biologists due to their unprecedented effects on global biodiversity, although there remains a lack of general knowledge as to the environmental consequences of such rapid change. Compared with any other class of animals, birds provide more long-term data and extensive time series, a more geographically and taxonomically diverse source of information, a richer source of data on a greater range of topics dealing with the effects of climate change, and a longer tradition of extensive research. The first edition of the book was widely cited and this new edition continues to provide an exhaustive and up-to-date synthesis of our rapidly expanding level of knowledge as it relates to birds, highlighting new methods and areas for future research. Effects of Climate Change on Birds is aimed at professional avian biologists and ornithologists as well as graduate students of avian ecology, evolution, and conservation. It will also be of relevance and use to a more general audience of climate change biologists, administrators, and conservationists because of the potential relevance of its theoretical and empirical content to other organisms including ourselves.

Scientists must communicate their work through clear writing and publish it where it will be read. To succeed, you need method, but also need to understand the worlds of journals, publishers and science evaluation. The Editor’s Guide to Writing and Publishing Science provides a comprehensive approach to how to write engaging papers, and strategies for publishing where they will be read and have impact. Drawing on decades of experience as a scientist, mentor and chief editor, Michael Hochberg offers a unique, authoritative view on writing science and into the little-known worlds of journals and publication. Succeeding in science means being a citizen of science, and The Editor’s Guide educates the reader in some of the most pressing issues and possible solutions, and provides key references for deeper exploration. Developing one’s career does not mean careerism, and Hochberg provides guidelines and advice for young researchers to engage in the craft of science, forge collaborations, contribute to the scientific commons as a peer reviewer and interact through social media. Understanding the challenges and opportunities in publishing is only possible with knowledge of how science communication is changing, and the reader is introduced to the important, emerging world of Open Science. Written in a practical and accessible way for students, postdoctoral researchers, early-career scientists and professionals across a wide range of scientific fields, The Editor’s Guide is a powerful tool for learning and improving individual skills, and can be the basis for discussion groups, or used as a text for dedicated classroom courses.