Browse

The rationale for this work is to make some sort of sense of the seeming myriad of adaptive explanations for why vertebrate brains vary in size. The role that natural selection has played in brain size has been addressed using the comparative method, which allows identification of evolutionary patterns across species. One starting assumption is that brain size is a useful proxy for intelligence and therefore that large-brained animals are more intelligent than smaller-brained animals. Five classes of selection pressure form the majority of explanations: ecology, technology, innovation, sex, and sociality. After chapters in which I describe the difficulties of measuring both brain size and intelligence (cognition), I address the evidence for each of the five factors in turn, reaching the conclusion that although ecology provides the best explanations for variation in the size of brain regions, none of the factors yet offers a robust and compelling explanation for variation in whole brain size. I end by providing the steps I consider necessary to reach such an explanation, steps that I suggest are feasible, if challenging.

This book explores the many rivers, lakes, and oceans that are losing oxygen. Aquatic habitats with little dissolved oxygen are called dead zones because nothing can live there except some microbes. The number and size of dead zones are increasing worldwide. The book shows that oxygen loss causes fish kills, devastates bottom-dwelling biota, reduces biological diversity, and rearranges aquatic food webs. In the 19th century in rich countries and in poor regions today, dead zones are accompanied by waterborne diseases that kill thousands of people. The open oceans are losing oxygen because of climate change, whereas dead zones in coastal waters and seas are caused by excessive nutrients, which promote excessive growth of algae and eventually oxygen depletion. Work by Gene Turner and Nancy Rabalais demonstrated that nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico come from fertilizers used in the US Midwest, home to the most productive cropland in the world. Agriculture is also the biggest source of nutrients fuelling dead zones in the Baltic Sea and other coastal waters. Today, fertilizers contaminate drinking water and kick-start harmful algal blooms in local lakes and reservoirs. Nutrient pollution in some regions has declined because of buffer zones, cover crops, and precision agriculture, but more needs to be done. The book concludes by arguing that each of us can do our part by changing our diet; eating less, especially eating less red meat, would improve our health and the health of the environment. A better diet could reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by agriculture and shrink dead zones worldwide.

Knowledge of how to get useful information from data is essential in the life and environmental sciences. This book provides learners with knowledge, experience, and confidence about how to efficiently and reliably discover useful information from data. The content is developed from first- and second-year undergraduate-level courses taught by the authors. It charts the journey from question, to raw data, to clean and tidy data, to visualizations that provide insights. This journey is presented as a repeatable workflow fit for use with many types of question, study, and data. Readers discover how to use R and RStudio, and learn key concepts for drawing appropriate conclusions from patterns in data. The book focuses on providing learners with a solid foundation of skills for working with data, and for getting useful information from data summaries and visualizations. It focuses on the strength of patterns (i.e. effect sizes) and their meaning (e.g. correlation or causation). It purposefully stays away from statistical tests and p-values. Concepts covered include distribution, sample, population, mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation, correlation, interactions, and non-independence. The journey from data to insight is illustrated by one workflow demonstration in the book, and three online. Each involves data collected in a real study. Readers can follow along by downloading the data, and learning from the descriptions of each step in the journey from the raw data to visualizations that show the answers to the questions posed in the original studies.

Population genetics is an inherently quantitative discipline. Because the focus of population genetics studies is usually on abstract concepts like the frequencies of genetic variants over time, it can at first glance be difficult to conceptualize and appropriately visualize. As more and more quantitative models and methods have become established in the discipline, it has become necessary for people just entering the field to quickly develop a good understanding of the many layers of complex approaches, so as to correctly interpret even basic results. An unfortunate side effect of the widespread implementation of ready-to-use quantitative software packages is that some facets of analysis can become rote, which at best might lead to implementation without the full understanding of the user and at worst, inappropriate application leading to misguided conclusions. In this book a “learning by doing” approach is employed to encourage readers to begin developing an intuitive understanding of population genetics concepts. The analytical software R, which has increasingly been the program of choice for early exposure to basic statistical programming, is freely available online, has cross-platform compatibility (Windows, Mac, and Linux all support distributions of R), and offers the potential for hands-on implementation by the students, in addition to using pre-packaged functions.

Marine sediments dominate the seafloor, creating one of the largest ecosystems on earth. Marine sediments contain some of the steepest known natural chemical gradients and are extraordinarily productive and reactive, particularly in shallow water. The plants and animals that live on and in marine sediments create highly heterogeneous conditions that strongly influence ecosystem functions and how marine ecosystems drive and respond to change. Seafloor biodiversity is a key mediator of ecosystem functioning, but its role is often excluded from global budgets or simplified to black boxes in ecosystem models. Despite this, marine sediments are fascinating places to study population, community and ecosystem ecology. This book provides an overview of soft-sediment ecosystems and how and why we should study them. It addresses the interactions between marine organisms and their physical and chemical environment, why we need to carefully design research and provides basic steps needed to both formulate good ecological questions and translate them into empirical studies of real-world ecosystems. It provides a context for different points of entry into soft-sediment ecology by offering a high-level approach. It is designed to help you think about the connections between different system components and drivers of change and identify how you can make a contribution to developing knowledge on the biodiversity and functioning of soft sediments and understanding ecosystem change, human impacts and the need for restoration.

This book is intended as a guide for anyone who is interested in animals and how their welfare can be assessed scientifically. It addresses the question of why, despite growing public interest in how animals are treated, it has proved so difficult to arrive at an agreed definition of what ‘animal welfare’ is and it then provides an answer. A definition of animal welfare as ‘health and animals having what they want’ can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions and shows what evidence we need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts an animal’s own point of view at the heart of the assessment of its welfare. The book shows how ‘health and what animals want’ also helps us to make sense of the long and often confusing list of welfare measurements that are now in use, such as ‘stress’ and ‘feel-good hormones’, expressive sounds and gestures, natural behaviour, cognitive bias and stereotypies. Animal sentience (conscious feelings of pleasure and suffering) are discussed in the context of our current knowledge of human and animal consciousness. Finally, the book highlights some key ideas in the relationship between animal welfare science and animal ethics and shows how closely the well-being of humans and that of animals are linked together.

Habitat is crucial to the survival and reproduction of individual organisms as well as persistence of populations. As such, species-habitat relationships have long been studied, particularly in the field of wildlife ecology and to a lesser extent in the more encompassing discipline of ecology. The habitat requirements of a species largely determine its spatial distribution and abundance in nature. One way to recognize and appreciate the over-riding importance of habitat is to consider that a young organism must find and settle into the appropriate type of habitat as one of the first challenges of life. This process can be cast in a probabilistic framework and used to better understand the mechanisms behind habitat preferences and selection. There are at least six distinctly different statistical approaches to conducting a habitat analysis – that is, identifying and quantifying the environmental variables that a species most strongly associates with. These are (1) comparison among group means (e.g., ANOVA), (2) multiple linear regression, (3) multiple logistic regression, (4) classification and regression trees, (5) multivariate techniques (Principal Components Analysis and Discriminant Function Analysis), and (6) occupancy modelling. Each of these is lucidly explained and demonstrated by application to a hypothetical dataset. The strengths and weaknesses of each method are discussed. Given the ongoing biodiversity crisis largely caused by habitat destruction, there is a crucial and general need to better characterize and understand the habitat requirements of many different species, particularly those that are threatened and endangered.

This book is a practical guide designed for students and researchers with an existing knowledge of R who wish to learn how to apply it in an epidemiological context and exploit its versatility. It also serves as a broader introduction to the quantitative aspects of modern practical epidemiology. The standard tools used in epidemiology are described and the practical use of R for these is explained and laid out. R code examples, many with output, are embedded throughout the text. Epidemiology with R is an advanced textbook suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate students, professional researchers, and practitioners in the fields of human and non-human epidemiology, public health, veterinary science, and biostatistics.

Population Biology of Vector-Borne Diseases is the first comprehensive survey of this rapidly developing field. The chapter topics provide an up-to-date presentation of classical concepts, reviews of emerging trends, synthesis of existing knowledge, and a prospective agenda for future research. The contributions offer authoritative and international perspectives from leading thinkers in the field. The dynamics of vector-borne diseases are far more intrinsically ecological compared with their directly transmitted equivalents. The environmental dependence of ectotherm vectors means that vector-borne pathogens are acutely sensitive to changing environmental conditions. Although perennially important vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue have deeply informed our understanding of vector-borne diseases, recent emerging viruses such as West Nile virus, Chikungunya virus, and Zika virus have generated new scientific questions and practical problems. The study of vector-borne disease has been a particularly rich source of ecological questions, while ecological theory has provided the conceptual tools for thinking about their evolution, transmission, and spatial extent.

America’s Scientific Treasures is a comprehensive travel guide, designed for adults, that takes the reader to well-known and lesser-known sites of scientific and technological interest in the United States. The book is divided into nine geographical chapters. Subdivided by states, each chapter is represented by its scientific and technological treasures, including museums, arboretums, zoos, national parks, planetariums, natural or technological points of interest, and the homes of famous scientists. While the book is aimed at adults, many of the sites may also be of interest to teens and younger children. The traveler is provided with essential information, including addresses, telephone numbers, hours of entry, handicapped access, dining facilities, dates open and closed, available public transportation, and websites. Nearly every site included here has been visited by the authors. Although written with scientists in mind, this book is for anyone who likes to travel and visit places of historical and scientific interest. Included are photographs of many sites within each state.

Conservation physiology is a rapidly expanding, multi-disciplinary field that uses physiological tools to characterize and solve conservation problems. This text provides a consolidated overview of the scope, purpose, and goals of conservation physiology, with a focus on animals. It outlines the major avenues by which conservation physiology is contributing to the monitoring, management, and restoration of animal populations and defines opportunities for growth in the field. By using a series of case studies, it illustrates how approaches from the conservation physiology toolbox tackle diverse conservation issues ranging from monitoring environmental stress, predicting the impact of climate change, understanding disease dynamics, improving captive breeding, reducing human–wildlife conflict, and many others. Moreover, by acting as practical road maps across a diversity of subdisciplines, these case studies will serve to increase the accessibility of this discipline to new researchers. The diversity of taxa, biological scales, and ecosystems that are highlighted illustrate the far-reaching nature of the discipline and allow readers to gain an appreciation for the purpose, value, and status of the field.

Forensic DNA evidence has helped convict the guilty, exonerate the wrongfully convicted, identify victims of genocide, and reunite families torn apart by war and repressive regimes. Yet many of the scientific, legal, and ethical concepts that underpin forensic DNA evidence remain unclear to the general public; judges; prosecutors; defense attorneys; and students of law, forensic sciences, ethics, and genetics. This book examines the history and development of DNA forensics; its applications in the courtroom and humanitarian settings; and the relevant scientific, legal, and psychosocial issues. It describes the DNA technology used to compare the genetic profile of a crime scene sample to that of a suspect, as well as the statistical interpretation of a match. It also reviews how databases can be searched to identify suspects and how DNA evidence can be used to exonerate the wrongfully convicted. Recent developments in DNA technology are reviewed, as are strategies for analyzing samples with multiple contributors. The book recounts how the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo searched for children kidnapped during military rule in Argentina, as well as more recent efforts to locate missing children in El Salvador. Other chapters examine the role that DNA forensics played in the identification of victims of genocide in Bosnia and of terrorism in the post-9/11 era. Social anthropologists, legal scholars, and scientists explore current applications of DNA analysis in human trafficking and mass catastrophes; border policies affecting immigration; and the ethical issues associated with privacy, informed consent, and the potential misuse of genetic data.

This book presents a new conceptualization of river-related policy issues, using concepts such as the Commercial and Cordon approaches to rivers and their opposite, the Ecological and Open approaches. It draws upon river-related experience from across the world to substantiate and illustrate these concepts. This new conceptualization will help to connect the river policy discussion of experts and specialists with that of river activists and the public. This shared discussion will allow better river policy formulation. The book argues for replacing the currently dominant Commercial and Cordon approaches to rivers by the Ecological and Open approaches, and it shows how such a policy change can be more conducive to achieving sustainable development. Rivers are a vital component of the ecology of the world. The earth’s hydrological cycle depends on them. As the world population grows and the demand for freshwater increases, rivers are coming under more stress. Many rivers are already exhausted before reaching the sea, and climate change further destabilizes them. River-related conflicts are spreading. The need to adopt correct river policies is more urgent than ever. Yet the current disconnection between river-related discussions by experts and specialists, on the one hand, and activists and policymakers, on the other, makes formulation of correct river policies difficult. By helping to move the river policy discussion from the confines of experts to the public arena, this book will allow formulation of more pro-people and pro-environment river policies.

Written by Jesús Rivas, the undisputed expert on the biology of anacondas, this is the first authoritative book on the biology of the green anaconda, the world’s largest snake. Rivas describes his experiences over a quarter of a century exploring the secret life of these fantastic snakes, including their diet, movement patterns, life and tribulations, survival, behavior, and fascinating reproductive life. But more than just presenting facts about anacondas, Rivas tells his story about studying them in the field. Ultimately, his love for anacondas and his unorthodox approach give his voice a unique accent that makes this book stand out among other books of its kind. The rich photography and its storytelling approach make this an enjoyable and thoroughly readable book that can sit as comfortably on a coffee table as in the bookshelves of advanced scholars.

Essential Ornithology provides the reader with a concise but comprehensive introduction to the biology of birds, one of the most widely studied taxonomic groups. The book begins by considering the dinosaur origins of birds and their subsequent evolution. Development, anatomy, and physiology are then discussed followed by chapters devoted to avian reproduction, migration, ecology, and conservation. Sections dealing with aspects of bird/human relationships and bird conservation give the book an applied context. This new edition has been thoroughly updated, providing new information from rapidly developing fields including the avian fossil record, urban and agricultural ecology, responses to climate change, invasive species biology, technologies to track movement, avian disease, and the role of citizen scientists. There is also a greater focus on North American ornithology. Drawing extensively upon the wider scientific literature, this engaging text places the results of classical studies of avian biology alongside the most recent scientific breakthroughs. Useful case studies are presented in a concise and engaging style with the student reader foremost in mind. Key points are highlighted and suggestions for guided reading and key references are included throughout. Essential Ornithology provides a companion text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in avian science, as well as a useful reference for professional researchers and consultants. Amateur ornithologists will also find this book offers a scientifically rigorous and accessible overview for a more general readership.

Game theory in biology seeks to predict social behaviour and other traits that influence how individuals interact. It does this by tentatively assuming that current traits are stable endpoints of evolution by natural selection. The theory is used to model aggressive behaviour, cooperation, negotiation, and signalling, as well as phenotypic attributes like an individual’s sex and mating type. This book covers the basic concepts and the traditional examples of biological game theory. It expands the frontiers of the field, emphasizing the importance of the co-evolution of traits and the implications of variation for reputation, markets, negotiation, and other social phenomena. It also highlights that it can be important to embed game interactions in the environment and an individual’s life. A major new direction developed in the book is that game theory can be extended by incorporating behavioural mechanisms, including mechanisms of reinforcement learning. By doing this the theory can successfully describe important phenomena like social dominance in group-living animals that previously have been difficult to model. By focusing on behavioural mechanisms, game theory can also make closer contact with empirical observation and with current research in fields like animal psychology and neuroscience.

This volume examines fisheries and aquaculture. The chapters in this volume synthesize the current understanding of the diverse topics in fisheries and aquaculture. The first part of the book explores worldwide crustacean fisheries and concludes with two chapters on harvested crustaceans that are usually not within the focus of the mainstream fisheries research, possibly because they are caught by local fishing communities in small-scale operations and sold locally as subsistence activity. In the second part of the book, the authors explore the variety of cultured crustacean species. The chapters of the third part of the volume focus on important challenges and opportunities, including diseases and parasitism, the use of crustaceans as bioindicators, and their role in biotechnology. Collectively, these 19 chapters provide a thorough exposition of the present knowledge across the major themes in crustacean fisheries and aquaculture.

This is the sixth volume of a ten-volume series on The Natural History of the Crustacea. The volume synthesizes in nineteen chapters our current understanding of diverse topics in crustacean reproductive biology. The first part of the volume address allocation strategies to reproduction, gamete production, brooding behavior and other components of parental care in crustaceans. The second part of the volume centers on sexual systems in crustaceans. The third section of the volume covers crustacean mating systems and sexual selection. The volume ends with three chapters covering diverse topics including reproductive rhythms, and crustacean personality research, and record breaking crustaceans with respect to reproductive characters. Collectively, these nineteen chapters provide an integrative and comprehensive treatment of crustacean reproductive biology from gamete formation to mating and reproductive strategies and their evolutionary and ecological consequences.

This volume examines Evolution and Biogeography of Crustacea, one of the dominant groups of animals, especially in aquatic environments. The first part of this volume is dedicated to the explanation of the origins and successful establishment of the Crustacea in the oceans. In the second part the biogeography of the Crustacea is explored in order to infer how they conquered different biomes globally, while adapting to a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial conditions. A final section examines more general patterns and processes, and looks to the future. Collectively, these eighteen chapters provide a thorough exposition of present knowledge across the major themes in evolution and biogeography of crustaceans. They do this by summarizing what is known and providing novel analyses of patterns.

The deep ocean is, by far, the planet’s largest biome and holds a wealth of potential natural assets. Most of the ocean lies beyond national jurisdiction and hence is the responsibility of us all. Human exploitation of the deep ocean is rapidly increasing, becoming more visible to many through the popular media. The scientific literature of deep-sea exploitation and its actual and potential effects has also rapidly expanded as a direct function of this increased national and global interest in deep-sea resources, both biological (e.g. fisheries, genetic resources) and non-biological (e.g. minerals, oil, gas, methane hydrate). At the same time there is a growing interest in deep-sea contamination (including plastics), with many such studies featured in high-profile scientific journals and covered by global media outlets. Finally, climate change is affecting even the deepest regions of our oceans and is a major priority for the international scientific and political agendas. However, there is currently no comprehensive integration of information about resource extraction, pollution and effects of climate change and these topics are only superficially covered in classic textbooks on deep-sea biology. The human race is at a pivotal point in potentially benefitting from the deep ocean’s natural resources and this concise and accessible work provides an account of past explorations and exploitations of the deep ocean, a present understanding of its natural capital and how this may be exploited sustainably for the benefit of humankind whilst maintaining its ecological integrity. The book gives a comprehensive account of geological and physical processes, ecology and biology, exploitation, management, and conservation.