Using the experience of the Parks in Peril program -- a wide-ranging project instituted by The Nature Conservancy and its partner organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean to foster better park management -- this book presents a broad analysis of current trends in park management and the implications for biodiversity conservation. It examines the context of current park management and challenges many commonly held views from social, political, and ecological perspectives. The book argues that: biodiversity conservation is inherently political sustainable use has limitations as a primary tool for biodiversity conservation effective park protection requires understanding the social context at varying scales of analysis actions to protect parks need a level of conceptual rigor that has been absent from recent programs built around slogans and stereotypesNine case studies highlight the interaction of ecosystems, local peoples, and policy in park management, and describe the context of field-based conservation from the perspective of those actually implementing the programs. Parks in Peril builds from the case studies and specific park-level concerns to a synthesis of findings from the sites. The editors draw on the case studies to challenge popular conceptions about parks and describe future directions that can ensure long-term biodiversity conservation.Throughout, contributors argue that protected areas are extremely important for the protection of biodiversity, yet such areas cannot be expected to serve as the sole means of biodiversity conservation. Requiring them to carry the entire burden of conservation is a recipe for ecological and social disaster.

Inductive zoology.

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:

I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.
II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.
III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV Metaphysics: on being as being.
V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

With more than two hundred species distributed from California through Texas and across most of mainland Mexico, Central and South America, and islands in the Caribbean Sea, the Phyllostomidae bat family (American leaf-nosed bats) is one of the world’s most diverse mammalian families. From an insectivorous ancestor, species living today, over about 30 million years, have evolved a hyper-diverse range of diets, from blood or small vertebrates, to consuming nectar, pollen, and fruit. Phyllostomid plant-visiting species are responsible for pollinating more than five hundred species of neotropical shrubs, trees, vines, and epiphytes—many of which are economically and ecologically important—and they also disperse the seeds of at least another five hundred plant species. Fruit-eating and seed-dispersing members of this family thus play a crucial role in the regeneration of neotropical forests, and the fruit eaters are among the most abundant mammals in these habitats.

Coauthored by leading experts in the field and synthesizing the latest advances in molecular biology and ecological methods, Phyllostomid Bats is the first overview in more than forty years of the evolution of the many morphological, behavioral, physiological, and ecological adaptations in this family. Featuring abundant illustrations as well as details on the current conservation status of phyllostomid species, it is both a comprehensive reference for these ecologically vital creatures and a fascinating exploration of the evolutionary process of adaptive radiation.

This is volume 95 issue 6 of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches primarily publishes original research in physiological ecology, ecophysiology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary physiology. Studies at all levels of biological organization from the molecular to the whole organism are welcome, and work that integrates across levels of organization is particularly encouraged. Studies that focus on behavior or morphology are welcome, so long as they include ties to physiology or biochemistry, in addition to having an ecological or evolutionary context. Subdisciplines of interest include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, energetics, structure and function of macromolecules, chemical coordination and signal transduction, nitrogen metabolism and excretion, locomotion and muscle function, biomechanics, circulation, behavioral, comparative and mechanistic endocrinology, sensory physiology, neural coordination, and ecotoxicology ecoimmunology.

This is volume 96 issue 1 of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches primarily publishes original research in physiological ecology, ecophysiology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary physiology. Studies at all levels of biological organization from the molecular to the whole organism are welcome, and work that integrates across levels of organization is particularly encouraged. Studies that focus on behavior or morphology are welcome, so long as they include ties to physiology or biochemistry, in addition to having an ecological or evolutionary context. Subdisciplines of interest include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, energetics, structure and function of macromolecules, chemical coordination and signal transduction, nitrogen metabolism and excretion, locomotion and muscle function, biomechanics, circulation, behavioral, comparative and mechanistic endocrinology, sensory physiology, neural coordination, and ecotoxicology ecoimmunology.

This is volume 96 issue 2 of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches primarily publishes original research in physiological ecology, ecophysiology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary physiology. Studies at all levels of biological organization from the molecular to the whole organism are welcome, and work that integrates across levels of organization is particularly encouraged. Studies that focus on behavior or morphology are welcome, so long as they include ties to physiology or biochemistry, in addition to having an ecological or evolutionary context. Subdisciplines of interest include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, energetics, structure and function of macromolecules, chemical coordination and signal transduction, nitrogen metabolism and excretion, locomotion and muscle function, biomechanics, circulation, behavioral, comparative and mechanistic endocrinology, sensory physiology, neural coordination, and ecotoxicology ecoimmunology.

This is volume 96 issue 3 of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches primarily publishes original research in physiological ecology, ecophysiology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary physiology. Studies at all levels of biological organization from the molecular to the whole organism are welcome, and work that integrates across levels of organization is particularly encouraged. Studies that focus on behavior or morphology are welcome, so long as they include ties to physiology or biochemistry, in addition to having an ecological or evolutionary context. Subdisciplines of interest include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, energetics, structure and function of macromolecules, chemical coordination and signal transduction, nitrogen metabolism and excretion, locomotion and muscle function, biomechanics, circulation, behavioral, comparative and mechanistic endocrinology, sensory physiology, neural coordination, and ecotoxicology ecoimmunology.

This is volume 96 issue 4 of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches primarily publishes original research in physiological ecology, ecophysiology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary physiology. Studies at all levels of biological organization from the molecular to the whole organism are welcome, and work that integrates across levels of organization is particularly encouraged. Studies that focus on behavior or morphology are welcome, so long as they include ties to physiology or biochemistry, in addition to having an ecological or evolutionary context. Subdisciplines of interest include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, energetics, structure and function of macromolecules, chemical coordination and signal transduction, nitrogen metabolism and excretion, locomotion and muscle function, biomechanics, circulation, behavioral, comparative and mechanistic endocrinology, sensory physiology, neural coordination, and ecotoxicology ecoimmunology.

This is volume 96 issue 5 of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches primarily publishes original research in physiological ecology, ecophysiology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary physiology. Studies at all levels of biological organization from the molecular to the whole organism are welcome, and work that integrates across levels of organization is particularly encouraged. Studies that focus on behavior or morphology are welcome, so long as they include ties to physiology or biochemistry, in addition to having an ecological or evolutionary context. Subdisciplines of interest include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, energetics, structure and function of macromolecules, chemical coordination and signal transduction, nitrogen metabolism and excretion, locomotion and muscle function, biomechanics, circulation, behavioral, comparative and mechanistic endocrinology, sensory physiology, neural coordination, and ecotoxicology ecoimmunology.

This is volume 96 issue 6 of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology: Ecological and Evolutionary Approaches primarily publishes original research in physiological ecology, ecophysiology, comparative physiology, and evolutionary physiology. Studies at all levels of biological organization from the molecular to the whole organism are welcome, and work that integrates across levels of organization is particularly encouraged. Studies that focus on behavior or morphology are welcome, so long as they include ties to physiology or biochemistry, in addition to having an ecological or evolutionary context. Subdisciplines of interest include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, energetics, structure and function of macromolecules, chemical coordination and signal transduction, nitrogen metabolism and excretion, locomotion and muscle function, biomechanics, circulation, behavioral, comparative and mechanistic endocrinology, sensory physiology, neural coordination, and ecotoxicology ecoimmunology.

The 25 color plates and 60 black-and-white illustrations offer readers a rare close look at this little-known and endangered group of insects. Three appendixes list all known flower-visiting records, all hymenopteran visitors to the flowers included in the pollination chapter, and all published species names for Masarinae. Pollen wasps are of interest to a wide range of scholars (including entomologists, ethologists, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists) because of their close associations with flowering plants and because of the ability of certain species to produce silk for nest building--an intriguing case of convergent evolution. For these readers, and for students of natural history and proponents of species preservation, The Pollen Wasps will prove an invaluable resource.

From the shell wars of hermit crabs to little blue penguins spying on potential rivals, power struggles in the animal kingdom are as diverse as they are fascinating, and this book illuminates their surprising range and connections.
 
The quest for power in animals is so much richer, so much more nuanced than who wins what knock-down, drag-out fight. Indeed, power struggles among animals often look more like an opera than a boxing match. Tracing the path to power for over thirty different species on six continents, writer and behavioral ecologist Lee Alan Dugatkin takes us on a journey around the globe, shepherded by leading researchers who have discovered that in everything from hyenas to dolphins, bonobos to field mice, cichlid fish to cuttlefish, copperhead snakes to ravens, and meerkats to mongooses, power revolves around spying, deception, manipulation, forming and breaking up alliances, complex assessments of potential opponents, building social networks, and more. Power pervades every aspect of the social life of animals: what they eat, where they eat, where they live, whom they mate with, how many offspring they produce, whom they join forces with, and whom they work to depose. In some species, power can even change an animal’s sex. Nor are humans invulnerable to this magnificently intricate melodrama: Dugatkin’s tales of the researchers studying power in animals are full of unexpected pitfalls, twists and turns, serendipity, and the pure joy of scientific discovery.

Constantine Slobodchikoff and colleagues synthesize the results of their long-running study of Gunnison’s prairie dogs (Cynomys gunnisoni), one of the keystone species of the short-grass prairie ecosystem. They set their research in the context of the biology of the five Cynomys species found in the United States and Mexico, and detail their investigation into the prairie dogs’ sophisticated system of barks, yips, and chirps, which Slobodchikoff argues represents a referential communication capable of fine distinctions among predators.

Seen as vermin that spoiled valuable rangeland, prairie dogs were long the subject of eradication campaigns and are now threatened by habitat loss and the loss of genetic diversity. The authors hope their research will help to pull the prairie dog back from the brink of extinction, as well as foster an appreciation of larger conservation challenges. By examining the complex factors behind prairie dog decline, we can begin to understand the problems inherent in our adversarial relationship with the natural world. Understanding these interactions is the first step toward a more sustainable future.

In the crab spider, Misumena vatia, Douglass H. Morse and his colleagues found an ideal species on which to test basic questions associated with lifetime fitness. From the moment a female crab spider selects a flower on which to sit and wait for her prey, there unfolds a cascade of lifetime fitness variables that determine her evolutionary success. Did she choose a flower that attracts suitable prey? Will she encounter a competitor or predator? Will she survive long enough to breed, and will her offspring contribute to the gene pool? Ecologists had previously identified variables that shape populations, but lacked the experimental data needed to make comprehensive tests of individuals that made different foraging decisions. Morse found that Misumena is particularly well suited to both field study and laboratory experiments. Over the last 25 years, his simple yet elegant experiments have contributed to our understanding of lifetime fitness and helped to develop study techniques that can be applied to animals with other, more complex, life histories. Predator upon a Flower recounts these influential discoveries in a gracefully crafted narrative that moves ever outward from individuals to communities to ecosystems, and concludes by suggesting directions for future research in spider biology.

Predictions about where different species are, where they are not, and how they move across a landscape or respond to human activities -- if timber is harvested, for instance, or stream flow altered -- are important aspects of the work of wildlife biologists, land managers, and the agencies and policymakers that govern natural resources. Despite the increased use and importance of model predictions, these predictions are seldom tested and have unknown levels of accuracy.Predicting Species Occurrences addresses those concerns, highlighting for managers and researchers the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, as well as the magnitude of the research required to improve or test predictions of currently used models. The book is an outgrowth of an international symposium held in October 1999 that brought together scientists and researchers at the forefront of efforts to process information about species at different spatial and temporal scales. It is a comprehensive reference that offers an exhaustive treatment of the subject, with 65 chapters by leading experts from around the world that: review the history of the theory and practice of modeling and present a standard terminology examine temporal and spatial scales in terms of their influence on patterns and processes of species distribution offer detailed discussions of state-of-the-art modeling tools and descriptions of methods for assessing model accuracy discuss how to predict species presence and abundance present examples of how spatially explicit data on demographics can provide important information for managers An introductory chapter by Michael A. Huston examines the ecological context in which predictions of species occurrences are made, and a concluding chapter by John A. Wiens offers an insightful review and synthesis of the topics examined along with guidance for future directions and cautions regarding misuse of models. Other contributors include Michael P. Austin, Barry R. Noon, Alan H. Fielding, Michael Goodchild, Brian A. Maurer, John T. Rotenberry, Paul Angermeier, Pierre R. Vernier, and more than a hundred others.Predicting Species Occurrences offers important new information about many of the topics raised in the seminal volume Wildlife 2000 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) and will be the standard reference on this subject for years to come. Its state-of-the-art assessment will play a key role in guiding the continued development and application of tools for making accurate predictions and is an indispensable volume for anyone engaged in species management or conservation.

“Monkey see, monkey do” may sound simple, but how an individual perceives and processes the behavior of another is one of the most complex and fascinating questions related to the social life of humans and other primates. In The Primate Mind, experts from around the world take a bottom-up approach to primate social behavior by investigating how the primate mind connects with other minds and exploring the shared neurological basis for imitation, joint action, cooperative behavior, and empathy.

In the past, there has been a tendency to ask all-or-nothing questions, such as whether primates possess a theory of mind, have self-awareness, or have culture. A bottom-up approach asks, rather, what are the underlying cognitive processes of such capacities, some of which may be rather basic and widespread. Prominent neuroscientists, psychologists, ethologists, and primatologists use methods ranging from developmental psychology to neurophysiology and neuroimaging to explore these evolutionary foundations.

A good example is mirror neurons, first discovered in monkeys but also assumed to be present in humans, that enable a fusing between one’s own motor system and the perceived actions of others. This allows individuals to read body language and respond to the emotions of others, interpret their actions and intentions, synchronize and coordinate activities, anticipate the behavior of others, and learn from them. The remarkable social sophistication of primates rests on these basic processes, which are extensively discussed in the pages of this volume.

At some point in the course of evolution—from a primeval social organization of early hominids—all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think.

Many books on kinship have been written by social anthropologists, but Primeval Kinship is the first book dedicated to the evolutionary origins of human kinship. And perhaps equally important, it is the first book to suggest that the study of kinship and social organization can provide a link between social and biological anthropology.