A wonderfully entertaining celebration of that most unique of creatures: the sloth.In public estimation, sloths have undergone an astonishing transformation in the course of the past few years. Thanks largely to YouTube clips posted by the sloth orphanage in Costa Rica, sloths have attracted a vast audience of admirers. Instead of seeing them as ridiculous anachronisms of which we know little, they have turned into creatures considered by many to be the most endearing on earth. Over much the sa...
BBC R4 Book of the Week 'Brilliant' Guardian 'Fascinating and often delightful' The Times What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story...
From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we canOCoand "should"OCoattend to animal emotions. With "How Animal...
A richly illustrated, captivating study of army ants, nature's preeminent social hunters.A swarm raid is one of nature's great spectacles. In tropical rainforests around the world, army ants march in groups by the thousands to overwhelm large solitary invertebrates, along with nests of termites, wasps, and other ants. They kill and dismember their prey and carry it back to their nest, where their hungry brood devours it. They are the ultimate social hunters, demonstrating the most fascinating co...
Multispecies Gastronomy (Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics)
by Dr Kelly Donati
Renowned wild horse ecologist Mary Ann Simonds provides a soup-to-nuts manual for stress-reduction in performance horses. Based on her 30-plus years of personal research and experience of wild horse ecology and domestic horse behaviour, as well as data provided by other equine scientists, readers will find a foundation of understanding related to the natural life cycle and history of the horse, from birth to forming friendships and families. The importance of gender, age, breed, culture, and hab...
Recent Advances in Research on Impulsivity and Impulsive Behaviors (Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences, #47)
This volume provides an empirical and conceptual overview of advances in our understanding of impulsivity and impulsive behaviors. Prominent scientists review the range of behavioral phenomena referred to as 'impulsive', as well as the defining features and psychological, neurocognitive and behavioral processes that underlie of the manifestation of impulsive behaviors, focussing on progress made and the questions remaining to be answered.
Dieses leicht verstandliche, unterhaltsame und humorvolle Sachbuch gibt Ihnen einen wissenschaftlich fundierten, aktuellen UEberblick zum Thema Stress. Es bietet Loesungen fur Ihre Probleme und zeigt auf, wie Gruppen unser Stresserleben beeinflussen. UEblicherweise heissen die Ursachen von Stresssymptomen und Burnout: individuelles Versagen, mangelnde Fahigkeiten, fehlendes Abgehartet-sein. Deshalb wird meist der Einzelne therapiert, z.B. durch eine Ruckenschule oder eine Kur. Dieses Buch bi...
Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London tells the remarkable story of Obaysch the hippopotamus, the first 'star' animal to be exhibited in the London Zoo. In 1850, a baby hippopotamus arrived in England, thought to be the first in Europe since the Roman Empire, and almost certainly the first in Britain since prehistoric times. Captured near an island in the White Nile, Obaysch was donated by the viceroy of Egypt in exchange for greyhounds and deerhounds. His arrival in London was greeted wi...
Swimming Physiology of Fish
In light of mounting fishing pressures, increased aquaculture production and a growing concern for fish well-being, improved knowledge on the swimming physiology of fish and its application to fisheries science and aquaculture is needed. This book presents recent investigations into some of the most extreme examples of swimming migrations in salmons, eels and tunas, integrating knowledge on their performance in the laboratory with that in their natural environment. For the first time, the applic...
A Legacy for Living Systems (Biosemiotics, #2)
Gregory Bateson’s contribution to 20th century thinking has appealed to scholars from a wide range of fields dealing in one way or another with aspects of communication and epistemology. A number of his insights were taken up and developed further in anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and communication theory. But the large, trans-disciplinary synthesis that, in his own mind, was his major contribution to science received little attention from the mainstream scientific communities. T...
Post-Genome Biology of Primates (Primatology Monographs)
In 2001, first reports of the human draft genome were published. Since then, genomes of many other organisms have been sequenced, including several primate species: the chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, gorilla, orangutan, gibbon, baboon, marmoset, tarsier, galago, lemur, and more recently Neanderthals. In a new era of "post-genome biology", scientists now have the vast amount of information revealed by genome research to confront one of the most challenging, fundamental questions in primatology and a...
Spatial Database for GPS Wildlife Tracking Data
This book guides animal ecologists, biologists and wildlife and data managers through a step-by-step procedure to build their own advanced software platforms to manage and process wildlife tracking data. This unique, problem-solving-oriented guide focuses on how to extract the most from GPS animal tracking data, while preventing error propagation and optimizing analysis performance. Based on the open source PostgreSQL/PostGIS spatial database, the software platform will allow researchers and man...
Der Band untersucht, inwieweit moralisch gutes oder schlechtes Handeln organisiert werden kann. Die Diskussion soziologischer Erklärungen des normativ Guten und Bösen in und von Organisationen beleuchtet den ambivalenten Zusammenhang von Moral und Organisation, da Organisationen sowohl für moralische Anliegen eintreten als auch moralisch-ethische Normen (teilweise sogar absichtlich) verletzen. Diese Ambivalenz adressiert der Band durch theoretisch-konzeptionelle Beiträge sowie durch empirische S...
Renowned for their dazzling plumages and elaborate courtship displays, birds of paradise and bowerbirds exhibit some of the most astonishing behaviors in the natural world. Birds of Paradise and Bowerbirds is the ultimate identification guide to these marvelous birds. This beautiful book features stunning color plates that depict all 108 recognized taxa in these two groups along with more than 200 color photos that showcase a broad range of racial and age-related plumage varieties. The comprehen...
Attention and Self-Regulation (Springer Series in Social Psychology)
by C. S. Carver and M. F. Scheier
"Seek simplicity and distrust it. " Alfred North Whitehead "It will become all too clear that an ability to see patterns in behavior, an ability that some might feel proud of, can lead more easily to a wrong description than a right one. " William T. Powers The goal of the theorist-the scholar-is to take a collection of observations of the world, and perceive order in them. This process necessarily imposes an artificial simplicity upon those observations. That is, specific observations are weigh...
Across the world, animals are being domesticated at an unprecedented rate and scale. But what exactly is domestication, and what does it tell us about ourselves? In this book, Marcus Baynes-Rock seeks the common thread linking stories about the domestication of Australia's native animals, arguing that domestication is part of a process by which late modernity threatens to undo the world. In a deeply personal account, the author tells of his encounters with crocodiles and emus behind fences, din...
Primates
Nonhuman primates (referred to here as primates) provide an invaluable source of information for a multitude of scientific fields including ecology, evolution, biology, psychology, and biomedicine. This volume addresses various topics related to primate research that includes phylogeny, natural observations, primate ecosystem, sociocognitive abilities, disease pathophysiology, and neuroscience. Topics discussed here provide a platform for which to address human evolution, habitat preservation, h...
Catology explores the bizarre and very funny world of feline science. Vital questions answered include:Why do cats have a secret second nose?Why don’t cats fart (but dogs do)?Do cats feel guilt, love, happiness or jealousy?Why are cats’ tongues covered in microscopic hooks?Do cats always land on their feet?Why are cats so scared of cucumbers?Why do cats purr both when happy and when distressed?How do you interpret cat language?Packed with fascinating facts, quirky scientific revelations and wei...