Download or read book Locomotion and Energetics in Arthropods written by Clyde F. Herreid and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the 1980 Christmas meetings of the American Society of zoologists in Seattle, Washington, the Division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry sponsored a symposium on the locomo tion and exercise of arthropods. This book is an outgrowth of that symposium. To our knowledge, the symposium and this volume are the first attempts to deal with all of the major modes of locomotion (flight, swimming, and pedestrian travel) among the arthropods in a comprehensive fashion. The time seems propitious to focus on arthropod locomotion. In the last decade enormous strides have been made in understand ing locomotion - both arthropod and vertebrate alike. There has been an explosion of new ideas, new techniques, and new data. These deserve greater attention and discussion than is possible in specialized journals. Hopefully this book will fill this gap; moreover, it should serve as a benchmark for newcomers to see what has happened to date and perhaps act as a launching pad for re search to come. Whatever the case, a symposium volume such as this serves to highlight our current strengths and weaknesses. In the present case it reveals the relative abundance of information on flying and walking and the dearth of data available on swimming; it exposes the fact that insects and crustaceans are fairly well studied and arachnids are not.

Download or read book Locomotion and Energetics in Arthropods written by Clyde F. Herreid and published by Springer. This book was released on 1981-10 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the 1980 Christmas meetings of the American Society of zoologists in Seattle, Washington, the Division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry sponsored a symposium on the locomo tion and exercise of arthropods. This book is an outgrowth of that symposium. To our knowledge, the symposium and this volume are the first attempts to deal with all of the major modes of locomotion (flight, swimming, and pedestrian travel) among the arthropods in a comprehensive fashion. The time seems propitious to focus on arthropod locomotion. In the last decade enormous strides have been made in understand ing locomotion - both arthropod and vertebrate alike. There has been an explosion of new ideas, new techniques, and new data. These deserve greater attention and discussion than is possible in specialized journals. Hopefully this book will fill this gap; moreover, it should serve as a benchmark for newcomers to see what has happened to date and perhaps act as a launching pad for re search to come. Whatever the case, a symposium volume such as this serves to highlight our current strengths and weaknesses. In the present case it reveals the relative abundance of information on flying and walking and the dearth of data available on swimming; it exposes the fact that insects and crustaceans are fairly well studied and arachnids are not.

Download or read book Principles of Animal Locomotion written by R. McNeill Alexander and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-19 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can geckoes walk on the ceiling and basilisk lizards run over water? What are the aerodynamic effects that enable small insects to fly? What are the relative merits of squids' jet-propelled swimming and fishes' tail-powered swimming? Why do horses change gait as they increase speed? What determines our own vertical leap? Recent technical advances have greatly increased researchers' ability to answer these questions with certainty and in detail. This text provides an up-to-date overview of how animals run, walk, jump, crawl, swim, soar, hover, and fly. Excluding only the tiny creatures that use cilia, it covers all animals that power their movements with muscle--from roundworms to whales, clams to elephants, and gnats to albatrosses. The introduction sets out the general rules governing all modes of animal locomotion and considers the performance criteria--such as speed, endurance, and economy--that have shaped their selection. It introduces energetics and optimality as basic principles. The text then tackles each of the major modes by which animals move on land, in water, and through air. It explains the mechanisms involved and the physical and biological forces shaping those mechanisms, paying particular attention to energy costs. Focusing on general principles but extensively discussing a wide variety of individual cases, this is a superb synthesis of current knowledge about animal locomotion. It will be enormously useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and a range of professional biologists, physicists, and engineers.

Download or read book Biology of the Land Crabs written by Warren W. Burggren and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988-04-29 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in land crabs has burgeoned as biologists have increasingly focused on the evolution of terrestriality. Before the publication of this volume in 1988, there had been no single comprehensive source of information to serve biologists interested in the diverse aspects of terrestrial decapod crustacean. Biology of the Land Crabs was the first synthesis of recent and long-established findings on brachyuran and anomuran crustaceans that have evolved varying degrees of adaptation for life on land. Chapters by leading researchers take a coordinated evolutionary and comparative approach to systematics and evolution, ecology, behaviour, reproduction, growth and molting, ion and water balance, respiration and circulation, and energetics and locomotion. Each discusses how terrestrial species have become adapted from ancestral freshwater or marine forms. With its extensive bibliography and comprehensive index, including the natural history of nearly eighty species of brachyuran and anomuran crabs, Biology of the Land Crabs will continue to be an invaluable reference for researchers and advanced students.

Download or read book Biology of Blood Sucking Insects written by Mike Lehane and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood-sucking insects are the vectors of many of the most debilitating parasites of man and his domesticated animals. In addition they are of considerable direct cost to the agricultural industry through losses in milk and meat yields, and through damage to hides and wool, etc. So, not surprisingly, many books of medical and veterinary entomology have been written. Most of these texts are organized taxonomically giving the details of the life-cycles, bionomics, relationship to disease and economic importance of each of the insect groups in turn. I have taken a different approach. This book is topic led and aims to discuss the biological themes which are common in the lives of blood-sucking insects. To do this I have concentrated on those aspects of the biology of these fascinating insects which have been clearly modified in some way to suit the blood-sucking habit. For example, I have discussed feeding and digestion in some detail because feeding on blood presents insects with special problems, but I have not discussed respiration because it is not affected in any particular way by haematophagy. Naturally there is a subjective element in the choice of topics for discussion and the weight given to each. I hope that I have not let my enthusiasm for particular subjects get the better of me on too many occasions and that the subject material achieves an overall balance.

Download or read book Medical Insects and Arachnids written by R.P. Lane and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surprising though it seems, the world faces almost as great a threat today from arthropod-borne diseases as it did in the heady days of the 1950s when global eradication of such diseases by eliminating their vectors with synthetic insecticides, particularly DDT, seemed a real possibility. Malaria, for example, still causes tremendous morbidity and mortality throughout the world, especially in Africa. Knowledge of the biology of insect and arachnid disease vectors is arguably more important now than it has ever been. Biological research directed at the development of better methods of control becomes even more important in the light of the partial failure of many control schemes that are based on insecticide- although not all is gloom, since basic biological studies have contributed enormously to the outstanding success of international control programmes such as the vast Onchocerciasis Control Programme in West Africa. It is a sine qua non for proper understanding of the epidemiology and successful vector control of any human disease transmitted by an arthropod that all concerned with the problem - medical entomologist, parasitologist, field technician - have a good basic understanding of the arthropod's biology. Knowledge will be needed not only of its direct relationship to any parasite or pathogen that it transmits but also of its structure, its life history and its behaviour - in short, its natural history. Above all, it will be necessary to be sure that it is correctly identified.

Download or read book Comparative Physiology written by K. Schmidt-Nielsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1978-03-30 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1978 volume contains papers from contributors to the Third International Conference on Comparative physiology. The Conference selected particular areas for examination. In the first section of this volume the problems of how animals can take up water vapour from the atmosphere are considered as well as advances in studies of how water movements across epithelia are generated by solute movements. The second section deals with how a wide variety of animals, both invertebrate and vertebrate, living under stress in ionically unbalanced environments cope with the unusual difficulties of ionic regulation. In the final section biologists and physicists examine the role of fluid mechanics in biology. Both the theoretical basis of the hydrodynamics and aerodynamics and the biological investigations on the variety of fluid flows encountered inside and around organisms are presented.

Download or read book The North American Porcupine written by Uldis Roze and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Long and sympathetic watching, radio tracking, chemical analysis are all part of this naturalist's ingenious and peaceable arsenal of inquiry into the lives of porcupines."--Scientific American

Download or read book Arthropod Biology and Evolution written by Alessandro Minelli and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two thirds of all living organisms described to date belong to the phylum Arthropoda. But their diversity, as measured in terms of species number, is also accompanied by an amazing disparity in terms of body form, developmental processes, and adaptations to every inhabitable place on Earth, from the deepest marine abysses to the earth surface and the air. The Arthropoda also include one of the most fashionable and extensively studied of all model organisms, the fruit-fly, whose name is not only linked forever to Mendelian and population genetics, but has more recently come back to centre stage as one of the most important and more extensively investigated models in developmental genetics. This approach has completely changed our appreciation of some of the most characteristic traits of arthropods as are the origin and evolution of segments, their regional and individual specialization, and the origin and evolution of the appendages. At approximately the same time as developmental genetics was eventually turning into the major agent in the birth of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), molecular phylogenetics was challenging the traditional views on arthropod phylogeny, including the relationships among the four major groups: insects, crustaceans, myriapods, and chelicerates. In the meantime, palaeontology was revealing an amazing number of extinct forms that on the one side have contributed to a radical revisitation of arthropod phylogeny, but on the other have provided evidence of a previously unexpected disparity of arthropod and arthropod-like forms that often challenge a clear-cut delimitation of the phylum.

Download or read book Robots and Biological Systems Towards a New Bionics written by Paolo Dario and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bionics evolved in the 1960s as a framework to pursue the development of artificial systems based on the study of biological systems. Numerous disciplines and technologies, including artificial intelligence and learningdevices, information processing, systems architecture and control, perception, sensory mechanisms, and bioenergetics, contributed to bionics research. This volume is based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop within the Special Programme on Sensory Systems for Robotic Control, held in Il Ciocco, Italy, in June 1989. A consensus emerged at the workshop, and is reflected in the book, on the value of learning from nature in order to derive guidelines for the design of intelligent machines which operate in unstructured environments. The papers in the book are grouped into seven chapters: vision and dynamic systems, hands and tactile perception, locomotion, intelligent motor control, design technologies, interfacing robots to nervous systems, and robot societies and self-organization.

Download or read book Osmotic and Ionic Regulation written by David H. Evans and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2008-11-18 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 40 years since the classic review of osmotic and ionic regulation written by Potts and Parry, there has been astonishing growth in scientific productivity, a marked shift in the direction and taxonomic distribution of research, and amazing changes in the technology of scientific research" It is indicative of the growth of the subject that as

Download or read book Feedback and Motor Control in Invertebrates and Vertebrates written by W. P. Barnes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of papers given by invited speakers at a Symposium on 'Feedback and Motor Control', held at the University of Glasgow from July 10th to 13th 1984, which was attended by over 200 scientists from 20 countries. The Symposium was the Fourth International Symposium organised by the Scottish Electrophysiological Society (SES), and on this occasion the SES joined forces with the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB), so that the Symposium was held dur ing the annual Summer Meeting of the SEB. A policy of the SES since its formation in 1970 has been to promote dialogue between scientists working on invertebrate and vertebrate nervous systems by hol

Download or read book Prerational Intelligence Adaptive Behavior and Intelligent Systems Without Symbols and Logic Volume 1 Volume 2 Prerational Intelligence Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Behavior of Natural and Artificial Systems Volume 3 written by Holk Cruse and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 1585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present book is the product of conferences held in Bielefeld at the Center for interdisciplinary Sturlies (ZiF) in connection with a year-long ZiF Research Group with the theme "Prerational intelligence". The premise ex plored by the research group is that traditional notions of intelligent behav ior, which form the basis for much work in artificial intelligence and cog nitive science, presuppose many basic capabilities which are not trivial, as more recent work in robotics and neuroscience has shown, and that these capabilities may be best understood as ernerging from interaction and coop eration in systems of simple agents, elements that accept inputs from and act upon their surroundings. The main focus is on the way animals and artificial systems process in formation about their surroundings in order to move and act adaptively. The analysis of the collective properties of systems of interacting agents, how ever, is a problern that occurs repeatedly in many disciplines. Therefore, contributions from a wide variety of areas have been included in order to obtain a broad overview of phenomena that demoostrate complexity arising from simple interactions or can be described as adaptive behavior arising from the collective action of groups of agents. To this end we have invited contributions on topics ranging from the development of complex structures and functions in systems ranging from cellular automata, genetic codes, and neural connectivity to social behavior and evolution. Additional contribu tions discuss traditional concepts of intelligence and adaptive behavior. 1.

Download or read book Prerational Intelligence written by Holk Cruse and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2000 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of prerational intelligence is on the way animals and artificial systems utilize information about their surroundings in order to behave intelligently; the premise is that logic and symbolic reasoning are neither necessary nor, possibly, sufficient. Experts in the fields of biology, psychology, robotics, AI, mathematics, engineering, computer science, and philosophy review the evidence that intelligent behaviour can arise in systems of simple agents interacting according to simple rules; that self-organization and interaction with the environment are critical; and that quick approximations may replace logical analyses. It is argued that a better understanding of the intelligence inherent in procedure like those illustrated will eventually shed light on how rational intelligence is realised in humans. Readership: Scientifically literate general readers and scientists in all fields interested in understanding and duplicating biological intelligence.

Download or read book Walking Machines written by D. J. Todd and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-08 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter of this book traces the history of the development of walking machines from the original ideas of man-amplifiers and military rough-ground transport to today's diverse academic and industrial research and development projects. It concludes with a brief account of research on other unusual methods of locomotion. The heart of the book is the next three chapters on the theory and engineering of legged robots. Chapter 2 presents the basics of land loco motion, going on to consider the energetics of legged movement and the description and classification of gaits. Chapter 3, dealing with the mechanics of legged vehicles, goes into leg number and arrangement, and discusses mechanical design and actuation methods. Chapter 4 deals with analysis and control, describing the aims of control theory and the methods of modelling and control which have been used for both highly dynamic robots and multi-legged machines. Having dealt with the theory of control it is necessary to discuss the computing system on which control is to be implemented. This is done in Chapter 5, which covers architectures, sensing, algorithms and pro gramming languages. Chapter 6 brings together the threads of the theory and engineering discussed in earlier chapters and summarizes the current walking machine research projects. Finally, the applications, both actual and potential, of legged locomotion are described. Introduction Research into legged machines is expanding rapidly. There are several reasons why this is happening at this particular time.

Download or read book Environmental Physiology of the Amphibians written by Martin E. Feder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-10-15 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its emphasis on recent research, its many summary tables, and its bibliography of more than 4,000 entries, this first modern, synthetic treatment of comparative amphibian environmental physiology emerges as the definitive reference for the field. Forty internationally respected experts review the primary data, examine current research trends, and identify productive avenues for future research.

Download or read book Economic and Ecological Significance of Arthropods in Diversified Ecosystems written by Akshay Kumar Chakravarthy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthropods are invertebrates that constitute over 90% of the animal kingdom, and their bio-ecology is closely linked with global functioning and survival. Arthropods play an important role in maintaining the health of ecosystems, provide livelihoods and nutrition to human communities, and are important indicators of environmental change. Yet the population trends of several arthropods species show them to be in decline. Arthropods constitute a dominant group with 1.2 million species influencing earth’s biodiversity. Among arthropods, insects are predominant, with ca. 1 million species and having evolved some 350 million years ago. Arthropods are closely associated with living and non-living entities alike, making the ecosystem services they provide crucially important. In order to be effective, plans for the conservation of arthropods and ecosystems should include a mixture of strategies like protecting key habitats and genomic studies to formulate relevant policies for in situ and ex situ conservation. This two-volume book focuses on capturing the essentials of arthropod inventories, biology, and conservation. Further, it seeks to identify the mechanisms by which arthropod populations can be sustained in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and by means of which certain problematic species be managed without producing harmful environmental side-effects. This edited compilation includes chapters contributed by over 80 biologists on a wide range of topics embracing the diversity, distribution, utility and conservation of arthropods and select groups of insect taxa. More importantly, it describes in detail the mechanisms of sustaining arthropod ecosystems, services and populations. It addresses the contribution of modern biological tools such as molecular and genetic techniques regulating gene expression, as well as conventional, indigenous practices in arthropod conservation. The contributors reiterate the importance of documenting and understanding the biology of arthropods from a holistic perspective before addressing conservation issues at large. This book offers a valuable resource for all zoologists, entomologists, ecologists, conservation biologists, policy makers, teachers and students interested in the conservation of biological resources.