Browse

Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia. Their ivory has been sought after and treasured in most cultures, and they have delighted zoo and circus audiences worldwide for centuries. But it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that people started to take an interest in elephants in the wild, and some of the most important studies of these intelligent giants have been conducted at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. This book provides a summation of what has been learned from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project—the longest continuously running elephant research project in the world. It presents more than three decades of uninterrupted study of over 2,500 individual elephants, from newborn calves to adult bulls to old matriarchs in their 60s. Chapters explore such topics as elephant ecosystems, genetics, communication, social behavior, and reproduction, as well as new developments from the study of elephant minds and cognition. The book closes with a view to the future, making arguments for the ethical treatment of elephants and suggestions to aid in their conservation.

Ask anyone who has owned a pet and they will assure you that, yes, animals have personalities. And science is beginning to agree. Researchers have demonstrated that both domesticated and nondomesticated animals—from invertebrates to monkeys and apes—behave in consistently different ways, meeting the criteria for what many define as personality. But why the differences, and how are personalities shaped by genes and environment? How did they evolve? The essays in this book reveal that there is much to learn from our furred and feathered friends. The study of animal personality is one of the fastest-growing areas of research in behavioral and evolutionary biology. Here the authors, along with a host of scholars from fields as diverse as ecology, genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, and psychology, provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on animal personality. Grouped into thematic sections, chapters approach the topic with empirical and theoretical material, and show that to fully understand why personality exists, we must consider the evolutionary processes which give rise to personality, the ecological correlates of personality differences, and the physiological mechanisms underlying personality variation.

At dawn on a brutally cold January morning, the author crouched in the icy grandeur of the Teton Range. It had been three years since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone after a sixty-year absence, and members of a wolf pack were approaching a herd of elk. To the author's utter shock, the elk ignored the wolves as they went in for the kill. The brutal attack that followed—swift and bloody—led him to hypothesize that after only six decades, the elk had forgotten to fear a species that had survived by eating them for hundreds of millennia. The author's fieldwork that frigid day raised important questions that would require years of travel and research to answer: Can naive animals avoid extinction when they encounter reintroduced carnivores? To what extent is fear culturally transmitted? And how can a better understanding of current predator-prey behavior help demystify past extinctions and inform future conservation? This book is the chronicle of the author's search for answers. From Yellowstone's elk and wolves to rhinos living with African lions and moose coexisting with tigers and bears in Asia, the author tracks cultures of fear in animals across continents and climates, engaging readers with a combination of natural history, personal experience, and conservation.

This book is an attempt to describe cognitive ecology, which focuses on the ecology and evolution of “cognition,” defined as the neuronal processes concerned with the acquisition, retention, and use of information. It presents new work on established and emergent research programs relating cognition to avian ecology. The authors find that, with few exceptions, all animals have to make decisions within the four general categories of feeding, predator avoidance, interactions with competitors, and sexual behavior. Few chapters of the book focus on cognitive aspects of decisions made within two of these behavioral categories of reproduction and antipredator behavior. Not much attention has been devoted to cognition at the embryonic stage, but recent experiments reviewed by the authors clearly indicate that embryos possess sophisticated abilities to assess and respond to cues of predation. The book also discusses the social information, social learning, and integrating knowledge about animals' natural behavior, ecology, and evolutionary history with the powerful empirical techniques of experimental psychology.

In this book, author Jane C. Desmond offers a performative analysis of the social phenomena that construct human-animal relations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Desmond explores the shared conditions of embodiment and physical copresence that shape human relationships with animals. She begins by examining human interactions with the bodies of non-individuated animals, including museum exhibitions of dead animals and taxidermy displays. Desmond uses the Body Worlds exhibit of plasticized human corpses as a point of contrast to argue that while human corpses are put on display in a way that emphasizes their universality, exhibits featuring dead animal bodies invite genericization. The following sections of the book deal with known or individuated animals such as pets. Desmond analyzes animal burial and mourning practices, paying special attention to pet obituaries and pet cemeteries, and discusses the underlying implications of cross-species kinship. She compares these grieving practices to humans’ uncompassionate treatment of animal roadkill. In the last part of the book, Desmond explores the marketing of animal intimacy, in particular the marketing of artwork created by animals. She focuses on the body traces left by animal artists as well as the distinction between primates and other animals that make art. Ultimately, Desmond uses these various examples to question the complicated politics of human-animal relations and interactions.

The comparative physiology of seemingly disparate organisms often serves as a surprising pathway to biological enlightenment. This book sheds new light on the remarkable physiology of diving seals through comparison with members of our own species on quests toward enlightenment: meditating yogis. As the text reveals, survival in extreme conditions such as those faced by seals is often not about running for cover or coming up for air, but rather about working within the confines of an environment and suppressing normal bodily function. Animals in this withdrawn state display reduced resting metabolic rates and are temporarily less dependent upon customary levels of oxygen. For diving seals—creatures especially well-adapted to prolonged submergence in the ocean's cold depths—such periods of rest lengthen dive endurance. But while human divers share modest, brief adjustments of suppressed metabolism with diving seals, it is the practiced response achieved during deep meditation that is characterized by metabolic rates well below normal levels, sometimes even approaching those of non-exercising diving seals. And the comparison does not end here: hibernating animals, infants during birth, near-drowning victims, and clams at low tide all also display similarly reduced metabolisms.

Societies develop as a result of the interactions of individuals as they compete and cooperate with one another in the evolutionary struggle to survive and reproduce successfully. Gorilla society is arranged according to these different and sometimes conflicting evolutionary goals of the sexes. In seeking to understand why gorilla society exists as it does, this book brings together extensive data on wild gorillas, collected over decades by numerous researchers working in diverse habitats across Africa, to illustrate how the social system of gorillas has evolved and endured. It introduces recent theories explaining primate societies; describes gorilla life history, ecology, and social systems; and explores both sexes' evolutionary strategies of survival and reproduction. The book concludes by offering suggestions for future research and conservation.

Judged by population size and distribution, homo sapiens are clearly the most successful primates. A close second, however, would be rhesus macaques, who have adapted to—and thrived in—such diverse environments as mountain forests, dry grasslands, and urban sprawl. Scientists have spent countless hours studying these opportunistic monkeys, but rhesus macaques have long been overshadowed in the public eye by the great apes, who, because of their greater intelligence, are naturally assumed to have more to teach us, both about other primates and about humans as well. This book shelves that misperception and gives rhesus macaques their turn in the spotlight. The product of more than twenty years studying these fascinating creatures, it caricatures a society that is as much human as monkey, with hierarchies and power struggles that would impress Niccolò Machiavelli himself. High-status macaques, for instance, maintain their rank through deft uses of violence and manipulation, while altruism is almost unknown and relationships are perpetually subject to the cruel laws of the market. Throughout this account, the author weds his knowledge of macaque behavior to his abiding fascination with human society and motivations. The result is a book that draws on economics as much as evolutionary biology, politics as much as primatology. Rife with unexpected connections and peppered with anecdotes, the book has as much to teach us about humans as it does about macaques.

Evolutionary maternal effects occur whenever a mother's phenotypic traits directly affect her offspring's phenotype, independent of the offspring's genotype. Some of the phenotypic traits that result in maternal effects have a genetic basis, whereas others are environmentally determined. For example, the size of a litter produced by a mammalian mother—a trait with a strong genetic basis—can affect the growth rate of her offspring, while a mother's dominance rank—an environmentally determined trait—can affect the dominance rank of her offspring. This book reflects advances in genomic, ecological, and behavioral research, as well new understandings of the evolutionary interplay between mothers and their offspring. The chapters aim to synthesize the vast literature on a range of species, highlighting evolutionary processes that were previously overlooked and proposing new avenues of research.

Research is showing that plants are in constant and lively discourse they communicate, signaling to remote organs within an individual, eavesdropping on neighboring individuals, and exchanging information with other organisms ranging from other plants to microbes to animals. Plants lack central nervous systems, and the mechanisms coordinating plant sensing, behavior, and communication are quite different from the systems that accomplish similar tasks in animals. But they are no less impressive from an evolutionary perspective. In Plant Communication, Karban puts an ear to the ground to reveal the world of plant communication and information sensing. He reveals their sensory capabilities, the learning capacity of plants, sensory signaling and communication, the different responses to pollinators and predators, and the mechanisms that undergird this impressive behavioral repertoire. The book shows that plants are hardly the inanimate organisms limited by their stationary existence.