Download or read book Encounters Between Colonies and the Behavioral Ecology of Seed harvesting Ants written by Mark Jason Freeland Brown and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ant Encounters written by Deborah M. Gordon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-22 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do ant colonies get anything done, when no one is in charge? An ant colony operates without a central control or hierarchy, and no ant directs another. Instead, ants decide what to do based on the rate, rhythm, and pattern of individual encounters and interactions--resulting in a dynamic network that coordinates the functions of the colony. Ant Encounters provides a revealing and accessible look into ant behavior from this complex systems perspective. Focusing on the moment-to-moment behavior of ant colonies, Deborah Gordon investigates the role of interaction networks in regulating colony behavior and relations among ant colonies. She shows how ant behavior within and between colonies arises from local interactions of individuals, and how interaction networks develop as a colony grows older and larger. The more rapidly ants react to their encounters, the more sensitively the entire colony responds to changing conditions. Gordon explores whether such reactive networks help a colony to survive and reproduce, how natural selection shapes colony networks, and how these structures compare to other analogous complex systems. Ant Encounters sheds light on the organizational behavior, ecology, and evolution of these diverse and ubiquitous social insects.
Download or read book From Colonies to Communities written by Nathan James Sanders and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 950 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cycles of Contingency written by Susan Oyama and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-01-24 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory (DST) offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from molecular biologists to anthropologists, because of its ability to integrate evolutionary theory and other disciplines without falling into traditional oppositions.The book provides historical background to DST, recent theoretical findings on the mechanisms of heredity, applications of the DST framework to behavioral development, implications of DST for the philosophy of biology, and critical reactions to DST.
Download or read book Consumer Control of Plant Communities in Current and Future Environments written by Halton Adrian Peters and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Behavioural Ecology of Ants written by J.H. Sudd and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with two problems: how eusociality, in which one individual forgoes reproduction to enhance the reproduction of a nestmate, could evolve under natural selection, and why it is found only in some insects-termites, ants and some bees and wasps. Although eusociality is apparently confined to insects, it has evolved a number of times in a single order of insects, the Hymenoptera. W. Hamilton's hypothesis, that the unusual haplodiploid mechanism of sex determination in the Hymenoptera singled this order out, still seems to have great explanatory power in the study of social ants. We believe that the direction, indeed confinement, of social altruism to close kin is the mainspring of social life in an ant colony, and the alternative explanatory schemes of, for example, parental manipu lation, should rightly be seen to operate within a system based on the selective support of kin. To control the flow of resources within their colony all its members resort to manipulations of their nestmates: parental manipulation of offspring is only one facet of a complex web of manipul ation, exploitation and competition for resources within the colony. The political intrigues extend outside the bounds of the colony, to insects and plants which have mutualistic relations with ants. In eusociality some individuals (sterile workers) do not pass their genes to a new generation directly. Instead, they tend the offspring of a close relation (in the simplest case their mother).
Download or read book Behavioral Mechanisms in Evolutionary Ecology written by Leslie Real and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-12-15 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length exploration of behavioral mechanisms in evolutionary ecology, this ambitious volume illuminates long-standing questions about cause-and-effect relations between an animal's behavior and its environment. By focusing on biological mechanisms—the sum of an animal's cognitive, neural, developmental, and hormonal processes—leading researchers demonstrate how the integrated study of animal physiology, cognitive processes, and social interaction can yield an enriched understanding of behavior. With studies of species ranging from insects to primates, the contributors examine how various animals identify and use environmental resources and deal with ecological constraints, as well as the roles of learning, communication, and cognitive aspects of social interaction in behavioral evolution. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how the study of internal mechanistic foundations of behavior in relation to their ecological and evolutionary contexts and outcomes provides valuable insight into such behaviors as predation, mating, and dispersal. Behavioral Mechanisms in Evolutionary Ecology shows how a mechanistic approach unites various levels of biological organization to provide a broader understanding of the biological bases of behavioral evolution.
Download or read book The American Naturalist written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Ecology of Collective Behavior written by Deborah M. Gordon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new perspective on collective behavior across biological systems Collective behavior is everywhere in nature, from gene transcription and cancer cells to ant colonies and human societies. It operates without central control, using local interactions among participants to allow groups to adjust to changing conditions. The Ecology of Collective Behavior brings together ideas from evolutionary biology, network science, and dynamical systems to present an ecological approach to understanding how the interactions of individuals generate collective outcomes. Deborah Gordon argues that the starting point for explaining how collective behavior works in any natural system is to consider how it changes in relation to the changing world around it. She shows how feedback use—the means by which networks of interactions operate—and the organization of interaction networks evolve to reflect the stability and demands of the environment. Ant colonies function collectively, and the enormous diversity of species in different habitats provides opportunities to look for general ecological patterns. Through an in-depth comparison of ant species, Gordon identifies broad trends in how the diversity of collective behavior in many other collective systems reflects the dynamics of the environment. Shedding light on how individual actions give rise to group behavior, The Ecology of Collective Behavior explains the evolution of collective behavior through innovation in participant interactions, offering new insights into how collective responses function in changing conditions.
Download or read book Comparative Psychology of Invertebrates written by Gary Greenberg and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1997. The papers in this volume on invertebrate behaviour, predominantly ant behaviour, are presented as a tribute to T. C. Schneirla and to his theoretical and experimental contributions to our understanding of the development and evolution of behaviour. His emphasis on development also brought to the fore new questions, many of which are addressed in this volume. Advances in technical instrumentation for research will be useful in reformulating these old questions in new and significantly constructive programs for responsible research. The theoretical contributions of Schneirla will continue to prove an important facilitation of those new research techniques.
Download or read book Saproxylic Insects written by Michael D. Ulyshen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers extensive information on insect life in dying and dead wood. Written and reviewed by leading experts from around the world, the twenty-five chapters included here provide the most global coverage possible and specifically address less-studied taxa and topics. An overarching goal of this work is to unite literature that has become fragmented along taxonomic and geographic lines. A particular effort was made to recognize the dominant roles that social insects (e.g., termites, ants and passalid beetles) play in saproxylic assemblages in many parts of the world without overlooking the non-social members of these communities. The book is divided into four parts: · Part I “Diversity” includes chapters addressing the major orders of saproxylic insects (Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, Lepidoptera and Blattodea), broadly organized in decreasing order of estimated global saproxylic diversity. In addition to order-level treatments, some chapters in this part discuss groups of particular interest, including pollinators, hymenopteran parasitoids, ants, stag and passalid beetles, and wood-feeding termites. · Part II “Ecology” discusses insect-fungal and insect-insect interactions, nutritional ecology, dispersal, seasonality, and vertical stratification. · Part III “Conservation” focuses on the importance of primary forests for saproxylic insects, offers recommendations for conserving these organisms in managed forests, discusses the relationships between saproxylic insects and fire, and addresses the value of tree hollows and highly-decomposed wood for saproxylic insects. Utilization of non-native wood by saproxylic insects and the suitability of urban environments for these organisms are also covered. · Lastly, Part IV “Methodological Advancements” highlights molecular tools for assessing saproxylic diversity. The book offers an accessible and insightful resource for natural historians of all kinds and will especially appeal to entomologists, ecologists, conservationists and foresters.
Download or read book Information Processing in Social Insects written by Claire Detrain and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claire Detrain, Jean-Louis Deneubourg and Jacques Pasteels Studies on insects have been pioneering in major fields of modern biology. In the 1970 s, research on pheromonal communication in insects gave birth to the dis cipline of chemical ecology and provided a scientific frame to extend this approach to other animal groups. In the 1980 s, the theory of kin selection, which was initially formulated by Hamilton to explain the rise of eusociality in insects, exploded into a field of research on its own and found applications in the under standing of community structures including vertebrate ones. In the same manner, recent studies, which decipher the collective behaviour of insect societies, might be now setting the stage for the elucidation of information processing in animals. Classically, problem solving is assumed to rely on the knowledge of a central unit which must take decisions and collect all pertinent information. However, an alternative method is extensively used in nature: problems can be collectively solved through the behaviour of individuals, which interact with each other and with the environment. The management of information, which is a major issue of animal behaviour, is interesting to study in a social life context, as it raises addi tional questions about conflict-cooperation trade-oft's. Insect societies have proven particularly open to experimental analysis: one can easily assemble or disassemble them and place them in controllable situations in the laboratory.
Download or read book Entomology Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 966 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Animal Behaviour Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Insect Ecology written by Timothy D. Schowalter and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text integrates the traditional emphases on insect diversity, life history adaptations and species interactions with insect roles in ecosystems subject to environmental changes.
