General

Despite its remote and seemingly rigorous environment, the Antarctic is the world's most important habitat for seals, currently supporting more seals than all other parts of the world combined. As various national Antarctic programmes were established to...

An increasing number of people accept competitiveness as a basis for living. However, while competitiveness may have its place, cooperation is more important in many contexts, and interpersonal relationships are the most important elements in our lives...

An increasing number of people accept competitiveness as a basis for living. However, while competitiveness may have its place, cooperation is more important in many contexts, and interpersonal relationships are the most important elements in our lives...

This attractively illustrated book reviews the effects of agricultural development on bird populations in Britain. Examining modern farmland as a bird habitat, it explains the changes, both in habitat structure and in available resources, that have...

Males and females often differ in developmental patterns, adult morphology, ecology and behaviour, and in many mammals males are often larger. Size dimorphism results in divergent nutritional and energetic requirements or reproductive strategies by the...

The importance in social relationships of the exchange of information by non-verbal gestures and expressions, though long appreciated by artists and writers, has only recently become the subject of serious scientific study. The subject has been...

Air temperature alone is not an adequate indication of environmental warmth. Wind, sunshine and humidity are also important. The notion that all these factors might be combined into a single figure indicating warmth is attractive. In this 1972 monograph,...

A 1981 treatment of the action and uses of the hormones and drugs that influence endocrine functions in the body as seen by a pharmacologist. The book includes a description of available drug preparations and expected therapeutic responses, and an...

When this historically significant volume was first published in 1968, the detailed study of the Trematoda had been sadly neglected in Britain and zoologists interested in this group had been obliged to search for information in foreign periodicals, or...

Reflecting the enormous advances made in the field over the past ten years, this text synthesizes the latest developments in the ecology and evolution of animal parasites against a backdrop of parallel advances in parasite systematics, biodiversity and...

This well-written and lively account of the principles of how motivational systems operate includes discussions of both theories and empirical results from individual systems. It reviews current experimental evidence on hunger, thirst, sex and other...

This is a comprehensive account of the behaviour and social organisation of humans and other animals. The development and evolution of all types of behaviour are reviewed using up-to-date examples. There is a full survey of all the classic behavioural...

This book describes the environment and behaviour patterns of the Weddell seal. Based on his numerous expeditions to the Antarctic, Dr Kooyman has analysed the seal's diving physiology and acoustical biology. The seal's remarkable adaptation to its...

The management of the elk population at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has been the subject of a long-standing controversy among wildlife biologists, with critics of the winter feeding program predicting that such intervention would result in overpopulation,...

This volume was first published in 1985. A knowledge of this phylum of parasitic worms is essential for helminthologists and instructive for all research workers investigating the principles of parasitism. Each of the chapters is written by a specialist...

First published in 1981, this book presents an original approach to an area of great importance in comparative zoology and physiology and evolutionary biology: the evolution of air breathing in vertebrates from aquatic ancestors. The subject is...

Comparative Physiology: Primitive Mammals attempts to dispel the widely held notion that 'primitive' animals are less advanced or less complex than the 'non-primitive'. The term 'primitive', or more accurately 'conservative', refers to the fact that...

This 1978 volume contains papers from contributors to the Third International Conference on Comparative physiology. The Conference selected particular areas for examination. In the first section of this volume the problems of how animals can take up...

Parasitology is an immensely important aspect of biological science. This manual presents fifty easy-to-follow laboratory exercises for student practical (lab) classes. All the exercises are tried and tested by the authors and are used in a wide variety...

There is often confusion over the meaning and usage of terms such as efficiency, economy, effectiveness, optimization and perfection in biology. This book defines and discusses these concepts within a broad evolutionary perspective and considers how...

Man's attempts to learn about aspects of the human body and its functions by observation and study of animals are to be found throughout history, especially at times and in cultures where the human body was considered sacrosanct, even after death. This...

Parasitic infections are the most prevalent of human diseases, and researchers continue to face the challenge of designing drugs to successfully counteract them. Chemotherapeutic Targets in Parasites analyzes the critical metabolic reactions and...

You are what you eat, or are you? What is in food? Where does it come from? Richard Lacey, Professor of Microbiology at Leeds University and a popular media critic on food issues, takes the reader on a culinary exploration into the world of food...

Environmental temperature varies in time and space on timescales ranging from a few hours to long-term climate change. Organisms are therefore continually challenged to regulate and maintain functional capacities as their thermal environment changes...

The maintenance of a stable acid-base status within biological tissue is a fundamental homeostatic process in all organisms, necessary to preserve the metabolic function of proteins and other macromolecules. The study of acid-base regulation has advanced...

Predator sensitive foraging represents the strategies that animals employ to balance the need to eat against the need to avoid being eaten. Ecologists working with a wide range of taxa have developed sophisticated theoretical models of these strategies,...

Cooperative breeding refers to a social system in which individuals other than the parents provide care for the offspring. Since individuals delay breeding and invest in the offspring of others, cooperative breeding poses a challenge to a Darwinian...

Many mammals, such as otters, live in close association with rivers and streams, feeding in them, or using them as a place of safety or means of escape from predators. The distinct adaptations that riparian mammals have evolved in order to live in these...

Bird song is one of the most remarkable and impressive sounds in the natural world, and has inspired not only students of natural history, but also great writers, poets and composers. Extensively updated from the first edition, the main thrust of this...

This book attempts to explore the contribution that biochemistry has made, thus far, to our understanding of the endocrine pancreas and its relationship to diabetes mellitus. It was written with the aim of using an important clinical problem to...

Game theory has revolutionized the study of animal behavior. The fundamental principle of evolutionary game theory--that the strategy adopted by one individual depends on the strategies exhibited by others--has proven a powerful tool in uncovering the...

This 1984 book arose from an international meeting held at Texel in the Netherlands in April 1981 to discuss the feeding requirements and behaviour of shorebirds and coastal wildfowl. The book was designed both for general ornithologists, so that they...

The last few years have seen the rapid development of new methodology in the field of molecular biology. New techniques have been regularly introduced and the sensitivity of older techniques greatly improved upon. Developments in the field of genetic...

Considers the processes and problems involved in multidisciplinary approaches to vision, focusing not only on detection tasks involving correlations between visual thresholds and cellular sensitivities, but also on the current status of neuron doctrines,...

In this introductory text, Dr. Birdi demonstrates experimental methods and analyses of fractal dimensions in natural processes. In addition to a general overview, he discusses in detail problems in the fields of chemistry, geochemistry, and biophysics...

Proceedings of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held in Granada, Spain, October 1991, with the objective of bringing together physicists and biologists with a common interest in pattern growth and in applying new tools across the areas of their...

This book came about as a result of a review I had written earlier on fea tures of cellular changes occurring during anuran metamorphosis. Only a limited treatment of this subject was possible in such a circumscribed work and only specific examples of...

It is now 17 years since the junior author's book Parasitic protozoa was first published, and 13 years since it received limited revision. The study of symbiotic protozoa has meanwhile progressed, and much of the content of the earlier book has been...

Some years ago a book reviewer, perhaps with Freudian honesty, remarked that the book in question 'filled a much needed gap in the literature'. That phrase has haunted the writing of this gap-filler and this preface may be considered an apologia. For a...

Inhibitors of cholinesterases have important applications in agricultural pest control, and in the medical treatment of myasthenia gravis and glaucoma, and the management of Alzheimer's disease. From an April 1992 conference in Eilat, Israel, 38 papers...