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"Animals Adaptation."
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How and why do animals adapt?
Animals adapt, or change, to stay alive. This informative book shows how change can happen over time in an animal's body or in the way it behaves due to changing climates, habitat changes, and opportunistic behaviors that help animals survive, such as the creation of new species.
Book
Sensory evolution on the threshold
From crocodiles and penguins to seals and whales, this comprehensive and authoritative synthesis explores the function and evolution of sensory systems in animals whose ancestors lived on land. Together, the contributors explore the dramatic transformation of smell, taste, sight, hearing, balance, mechanoreception, magnetoreception, and electroreception that occurred as lineages of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals returned to aquatic environments. Each chapter integrates data from fields including sensory physiology, anatomy, paleontology, and neurobiology. A one-stop source for information on the sense organs of secondarily aquatic tetrapods, Sensory Evolution on the Threshold sheds new light on both the evolution of aquatic vertebrates and the sensory biology of their astonishing transition.
eBook
Outrageous animal adaptations : from big-eared bats to frill-necked lizards
A fish that walks on land, a frog that makes its own sunscreen, and an insect that can become invisible? These are just a few examples of how Earth's creatures have evolved some outrageous features and tricks to ensure survival.
Book
Engineering Animals
From an engineer's perspective, how do specialized adaptations among living things really work? Writing with wit and a richly informed sense of wonder, Denny and Alan offer an expert look at animals--including humans--as works of evolutionary engineering, each exquisitely adapted to a specific manner of survival.
eBook
cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation
In the last 60,000 y humans have expanded across the globe and now occupy a wider range than any other terrestrial species. Our ability to successfully adapt to such a diverse range of habitats is often explained in terms of our cognitive ability. Humans have relatively bigger brains and more computing power than other animals, and this allows us to figure out how to live in a wide range of environments. Here we argue that humans may be smarter than other creatures, but none of us is nearly smart enough to acquire all of the information necessary to survive in any single habitat. In even the simplest foraging societies, people depend on a vast array of tools, detailed bodies of local knowledge, and complex social arrangements and often do not understand why these tools, beliefs, and behaviors are adaptive. We owe our success to our uniquely developed ability to learn from others. This capacity enables humans to gradually accumulate information across generations and develop well-adapted tools, beliefs, and practices that are too complex for any single individual to invent during their lifetime.
Journal Article
What can live in a lake?
Introduces readers to animals that live in a lake and the concept of habitat. Simple text describes the common features and behaviors of lake dwellers as well as offering many examples of creatures in this group.
Book
Extinctions and Invasions
Eight thousand years ago, when the sea cut Britain off from the rest of the Continent, the island's fauna was very different: most of the animals familiar to us today were not present, whilst others, now extinct, were abundant. Over the course of millennia humans have manipulated Britain's fauna. For reasons of fear, suspicion, desire, or simply inadvertently, certain species were brought to extinction. In their place new animals were introduced: some transported purposefully by invading populations, others sent as royal gifts from far off lands, whilst several species arrived as stowaways. The story of each is fascinating, telling of the changing and multi-layered relationship between humans and animals. Drawing on new research in the fields of archaeology, ecology and history, this book examines how human society, culture, diet, lifestyles and even whole landscapes were fundamentally shaped by the animal extinctions and introductions that occurred in Britain since the last Ice Age. In its 22 chapters a wide range of mammal, bird, fish, snail and insect species are considered. All of the chapters include new and original research presented by authors who are acknowledged experts on their specific topic. Extinctions and Invasions advances our understanding of Britain's natural history whilst dispelling the myths that have become established in both popular and academic literature. It is written in a style accessible to the general reader, whilst providing the depth of research needed by academic researchers. Extinctions and Invasions provides a valuable single source of information for archaeologists, natural historians and conservation biologists, as well as interested laypeople.
eBook
Sand swimmers : the secret life of Australia's desert wilderness /
In the center of Australia lies a strange desert wilderness called the Dead Heart. It's difficult to imagine anything can exist in such a forbidding place, but the Dead Heart contains amazing stories of adaptation and survival. Follow in the footsteps of early explorers like Charles Sturt and learn what the indigenous people of Australia have long known: not all is quite as it seems.
Book
Ice, Fire, and Nutcrackers
Why do quaking aspens grow in prominent clumps rather than randomly scattered across the landscape? Why and how does a rufous hummingbird drop its metabolism to one-hundredth of its normal rate? Why do bull elk grow those enormous antlers? Using his experience as a biologist and ecologist, George Constantz illuminates these remarkable slices of mountain life in plain but engaging language. Whether it sketches conflict or cooperation, surprise or familiarity, each story resolves when interpreted through the theory of evolution by natural selection.
These provocative accounts of birds, insects, rodents, predators, trees, and flowers are sure to stir the reader’s curiosity. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a rattlesnake’s ability to hunt in total darkness by detecting the infrared radiation emitted by a mouse? Or how white-tailed ptarmigan thrive in their high, treeless alpine environments -- even through the winter? The narratives, often brought home with a counterintuitive twist, invite readers to make new connections and broaden perspectives of a favorite outdoor place.
eBook