The Rise of Marine Mammals reveals remarkable fossil record discoveries that shed light on the origins, relationships, and diversification of marine mammals. Focusing on evolution and paleobiology, Berta provides an overview of marine mammal species diversity, enhanced with gorgeous life restorations by Carl Buell, Robert Boessenecker, William Stout, and Ray Troll and extensive line drawings by graphics editor James L. Sumich. The book also considers ongoing conservation challenges, demonstrating how the fossil record of adaptation in response to past environmental shifts may illuminate the way that marine mammals respond to global climate change. This invaluable evolutionary framework is essential for helping us understand how best to protect and conserve today's polar bears, whales, dolphins, seals, and fellow warm-blooded ocean dwellers.
As human threats to the Earth's biota span unprecedented temporal and spatial scales, it has become urgent to integrate currently disparate areas of conservation biology into a unified framework. Combining conservation genetics, demography, and ecology, this book presents an integrative approach to managing species as well as ecological and evolutionary processes. The contributions are intended for students, professionals, and researchers in conservation biology, ecology, genetics, and evolution.
Insects provide excellent model systems for understanding evolutionary ecology. They are abundant, small, and relatively easy to rear, and these traits facilitate both field and laboratory experiments. This book has been developed from the Royal Entomological Society's 22nd international symposium, held in Reading in 2003. Topics include speciation and adaptation; life history, phenotype plasticity and genetics; sexual selection and reproductive biology; insect-plant interactions; insect-natural enemy interactions; and social insects.
Photopigments are molecules that react to light and mediate a number of processes and behaviours in animals. Visual pigments housed within the photoreceptors of the eye, such as the rods and cones in vertebrates are the best known, however, visual pigments are increasingly being found in other tissues, including other retinal cells, the skin and the brain. Other closely related molecules from the G protein family, such as melanopsin mediate light driven processes including circadian rhythmicity and pupil constriction. This Volume examines the enormous diversity of visual pigments and traces the evolution of these G protein coupled receptors in both invertebrates and vertebrates in the context of the visual and non-visual demands dictated by a species' ecological niche.
The basic goal of the volume is to compile the most up to date research on how high altitude affects the behavior, ecology, evolution and conservation status of primates, especially in comparison to lowland populations. Historically, the majority of primate studies have focused on lowland populations. However, as the lowlands have been disappearing, more and more primatologists have begun studying populations located in higher altitudes. High altitude populations are important not only because of their uniqueness, but also because they highlight the range of primate adaptability and the complex variables that are involved in primate evolution. These populations are good examples of how geographic scales result in diversification and/or speciation. Yet, there have been very few papers addressing how this high altitude environment affects the behavior, ecology, and conservation status of these primates.
Evolutionary Analysis
How the Zebra Got Its Stripes
Adaptive Genetic Variation in the Wild
Bird Migration and Global Change
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