Download or read book The Venus Flytrap Attracts Insects by the Release of Volatile Organic Compounds written by Jürgen Kreuzwieser and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cheats and Deceits written by Martin Stevens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nature, trickery and deception are widespread. Animals and plants mimic other objects or species in the environment for protection, trick other species into rearing their young, lure prey to their death, and deceive potential mates for reproduction. Cuckoos lay eggs carefully matched to their host's own clutch. Harmless butterflies mimic the wing patterning of a poisonous butterfly to avoid being eaten. The deep-sea angler fish hangs a glowing, fleshy lure in front of its mouth to draw the attention of potential prey, while some male fish alter their appearance to look like females in order to sneak past rivals in mating. Some orchids develop the smell of female insects in order to attract pollinators, while carnivorous plants lure insects to their death with colourful displays. In this book, Martin Stevens describes the remarkable range of such adaptations in nature, and considers how they have evolved, and become increasingly perfected as part of an arms race between predator and prey or host and parasite. He explores the work of naturalists and biologists from Alfred Russel Wallace to current research, showing how scientists find ways of testing the impact of particular behaviours and colourings on the animals it is meant to fool, as opposed to our human perceptions. Drawing on a wide range of examples, Stevens considers what deception tells us about the process of evolution and adaptation.
Download or read book Biology of Floral Scent written by Natalia Dudareva and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2006-03-27 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As with nearly all living creatures, humans have always been attracted and intrigued by floral scents. Yet, while we have been manufacturing perfumes for at least 5000 years to serve a myriad of religious, sexual, and medicinal purposes, until very recently, the limitation of our olfactory faculty has greatly hindered our capacity to clearly and ob
Download or read book Aquatic Dicotyledons of North America written by Donald H. Les and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 3174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aquatic Dicotyledons of North America: Ecology, Life History, and Systematics brings together a wealth of information on the natural history, ecology, and systematics of North American aquatic plants. Most books on aquatic plants have a taxonomic focus and are intended primarily for identification. Instead, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the biology of major aquatic species by compiling information from numerous sources that lie scattered among the primary literature, herbarium databases, and other reference materials. Included dicotyledon species are those having an obligate (OBL) wetland status, a designation used in the USACE National Wetland Plant List. Recent phylogenetic analyses are incorporated and rationale is provided for interpreting this information with respect to species relationships. This diverse assemblage of information will be useful to a wide range of interests including academic researchers, wildlife managers, students, and virtually anyone interested in the natural history of aquatic and wetland plants. Although focusing specifically on North America, the cosmopolitan distribution of many aquatic plants should make this an attractive text to people working virtually anywhere outside of the region as well. This book is an essential resource for assisting with wetland delineation.
Download or read book Carnivorous Plants written by Aaron M. Ellison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carnivorous plants have fascinated botanists, evolutionary biologists, ecologists, physiologists, developmental biologists, anatomists, horticulturalists, and the general public for centuries. Charles Darwin was the first scientist to demonstrate experimentally that some plants could actually attract, kill, digest, and absorb nutrients from insect prey; his book Insectivorous Plants (1875) remains a widely-cited classic. Since then, many movies and plays, short stories, novels, coffee-table picture books, and popular books on the cultivation of carnivorous plants have been produced. However, all of these widely read products depend on accurate scientific information, and most of them have repeated and recycled data from just three comprehensive, but now long out of date, scientific monographs. The field has evolved and changed dramatically in the nearly 30 years since the last of these books was published, and thousands of scientific papers on carnivorous plants have appeared in the academic journal literature. In response, Ellison and Adamec have assembled the world's leading experts to provide a truly modern synthesis. They examine every aspect of physiology, biochemistry, genomics, ecology, and evolution of these remarkable plants, culminating in a description of the serious threats they now face from over-collection, poaching, habitat loss, and climatic change which directly threaten their habitats and continued persistence in them.
Download or read book Ecological Biochemistry written by Gerd-Joachim Krauss and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first stand-alone textbook for at least ten years on this increasingly hot topic in times of global climate change and sustainability in ecosystems. Ecological biochemistry refers to the interaction of organisms with their abiotic environment and other organisms by chemical means. Biotic and abiotic factors determine the biochemical flexibility of organisms, which otherwise easily adapt to environmental changes by altering their metabolism. Sessile plants, in particular, have evolved intricate biochemical response mechanisms to fit into a changing environment. This book covers the chemistry behind these interactions, bottom up from the atomic to the system's level. An introductory part explains the physico-chemical basis and biochemical roots of living cells, leading to secondary metabolites as crucial bridges between organisms and the respective ecosystem. The focus then shifts to the biochemical interactions of plants, fungi and bacteria within terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems with the aim of linking biochemical insights to ecological research, also in human-influenced habitats. A section is devoted to methodology, which allows network-based analyses of molecular processes underlying systems phenomena. A companion website offering an extended version of the introductory chapter on Basic Biochemical Roots is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/Krauss/Nies/EcologicalBiochemistry
Download or read book Mimicry Crypsis Masquerade and other Adaptive Resemblances written by Donald L. J. Quicke and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-08-02 with total page 1393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deals with all aspects of adaptive resemblance Full colour Covers everything from classic examples of Batesian, Mullerian, aggressive and sexual mimicries through to human behavioural and microbial molecular deceptions Highlights areas where additonal work or specific exeprimentation could be fruitful Includes, animals, plants, micro-organisms and humans
Download or read book Multi and Megavariate Data Analysis Basic Principles and Applications written by L. Eriksson and published by Umetrics Academy. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand the world around us, as well as ourselves, we need to measure many things, many variables, many properties of the systems and processes we investigate. Hence, data collected in science, technology, and almost everywhere else are multivariate, a data table with multiple variables measured on multiple observations (cases, samples, items, process time points, experiments). This book describes a remarkably simple minimalistic and practical approach to the analysis of data tables (multivariate data). The approach is based on projection methods, which are PCA (principal components analysis), and PLS (projection to latent structures) and the book shows how this works in science and technology for a wide variety of applications. In particular, it is shown how the great information content in well collected multivariate data can be expressed in terms of simple but illuminating plots, facilitating the understanding and interpretation of the data. The projection approach applies to a variety of data-analytical objectives, i.e., (i) summarizing and visualizing a data set, (ii) multivariate classification and discriminant analysis, and (iii) finding quantitative relationships among the variables. This works with any shape of data table, with many or few variables (columns), many or few observations (rows), and complete or incomplete data tables (missing data). In particular, projections handle data matrices with more variables than observations very well, and the data can be noisy and highly collinear. Authors: The five authors are all connected to the Umetrics company (www.umetrics.com) which has developed and sold software for multivariate analysis since 1987, as well as supports customers with training and consultations. Umetrics' customers include most large and medium sized companies in the pharmaceutical, biopharm, chemical, and semiconductor sectors.
Download or read book Materials that Move written by Murat Bengisu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a design-driven investigation into smart materials developed by chemists, physicists, materials and chemical engineers, and applied by designers to consumer products, buildings, interfaces, or textiles. Introducing a class of smart materials (referred to as stimuli-responsive, morphing or kinetic materials) that move and change their shape in response to stimuli, the book presents their characteristics, advantages, potentials, as well as the difficulties involved in their application. The book also presents a large number of case studies on products, projects, concepts, and experiments employing smart materials, thus mapping out new design territories for these innovative materials. The case studies involve different fields of design, including product, interior, fashion, and communication design. Reflecting the growing demand for sustainable and human-centered design agendas, the book explores and reveals the role and influence of these new materials and technologies on design and human experience, and discusses how they can be used to redefine our objects and spaces so as to promote more resilient environments. The book offers an intriguing and valuable resource for design professionals, engineers, scientists and students alike.
Download or read book Nematode Trapping Fungi written by Ke-Qin Zhang and published by Springer Science & Business. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These chapters provide up-to-date information on nematophagous fungi, particularly those of the Orbiliaceae in Ascomycota, whose asexual states produce nematode-trapping devices. The authors consider fungal-nematode interactions, fossil fungi, the biodiversity, ecology and geographical distribution of nematode-trapping fungi, and their potential use in biocontrol of nematodes, all in detail. Nematode-trapping fungi with adhesive or mechanical hyphal traps are the main focus of this book which begins with an overview of the data on nematode-trapping fungi, including their taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution. Subsequent chapters expand upon the methods and techniques used to study these fascinating fungi. Keys for genera of Arthrobotrys, Drechslerella and Dactylellina, which include all reported species of predatory orbiliaceous fungi are presented and numerous species from these genera are morphologically described and illustrated. The ecology of nematode-trapping fungi is expertly presented: their occurrence and habitats, their geographical and seasonal distribution and the effects of soil conditions and nematode density on their distribution all feature amongst the relevant themes. Further chapters examine the use of nematode-trapping fungi in biological control and the authors consider nematicidal activities in detail, exploring the many compounds from fungi that feature in nematicidal activities and of course useful paths for further study on this topic. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book, providing scientific insight for scholars with an interest in fungi and in biological control of nematodes.
Download or read book The Carnivorous Plants written by Francis Ernest Lloyd and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience which has led to the writing of this book began in 1929 when, examining a species related to Utricularia gibba, I made an observation of some importance in understanding the mechanism of the trap. This begot a desire to study as many other species of the genus as I could obtain for comparison, primarily to determine the validity of my conclusions. My feeling that research in this field was promising was strengthened by the discovery that the pertinent literature was singularly barren of the information most needed, that is to say, precise accounts of the structure of the entrance mechanisms of the traps. And an examination of much herbarium material, because of the meagreness of the underground parts of the terrestrial types resulting from indifferent methods of collection, forced the conclusion that, even had other difficulties inherent in studying dried material not intervened, it would be necessary to obtain adequately preserved specimens. This meant a wide correspondence and, if possible, extensive travel. The uncertainty of achieving the latter made the former imperative.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory written by Teena Gabrielson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, defines, illustrates, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Featuring contributions from distinguished political scientists working in this field, this volume addresses canonical theorists and contemporary environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial volume focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry, engaging both traditions of political thought and the academy. In the second section, the handbook explores conceptualizations of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries within our environments. A third section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists—including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, and flourishing—and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for on-going environmental action and change.
Download or read book Plant animal Interactions written by Warren G. Abrahamson and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1989 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thorough coverage of multitrophic-level plant-animal interactions. Discusses a wide range of significant aspects, such as herbivore-plant interactions (with coverage of insects as well as mammals), carnivorous plant ecology and evolution, pollination and population dispersal agents, plant communities as habitats for animals, interactions in agroecosystems, and coevolution.
Download or read book The Carnivorous Plants written by Barrie Edward Juniper and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plants, as is now becoming widely recognised, exploit animals in almost as many ways as animals use plants; only rarely, however, do they eat animals in the sense of catching, holding, and devouring prey. The manner, however, in which they function as carnivores grants insights into plant form, function, and evolution not otherwise readily available. The diversity of morphological, biochemical, and commensal features generates both the lay and the scientific interest in this diverse group. The carnivorous plants exhibit features which are common to many other non-carnivorous plants. However the extent to which these features have developed and the combination of different features in small organs is unique and therefore, can be exploited by using these plants as models for scientific research.
Download or read book Annual Plant Reviews Insect Plant Interactions written by Claudia Voelckel and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-05-02 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This latest volume in Wiley Blackwell’s prestigious Annual Plant Reviews brings together articles that describe the biochemical, genetic, and ecological aspects of plant interactions with insect herbivores.. The biochemistry section of this outstanding volume includes reviews highlighting significant findings in the area of plant signalling cascades, recognition of herbivore-associated molecular patterns, sequestration of plant defensive metabolites and perception of plant semiochemicals by insects. Chapters in the genetics section are focused on genetic mapping of herbivore resistance traits and the analysis of transcriptional responses in both plants and insects. The ecology section includes chapters that describe plant-insect interactions at a higher level, including multitrophic interactions, investigations of the cost-benefit paradigm and the altitudinal niche-breadth hypothesis, and a re-evaluation of co-evolution in the light of recent molecular research. Written by many of the world’s leading researchers in these subjects, and edited by Claudia Voelckel and Georg Jander, this volume is designed for students and researchers with some background in plant molecular biology or ecology, who would like to learn more about recent advances or obtain a more in-depth understanding of this field. This volume will also be of great use and interest to a wide range of plant scientists and entomologists and is an essential purchase for universities and research establishments where biological sciences are studied and taught. To view details of volumes in Annual Plant Reviews, visit: www.wiley.com/go/apr Also available from Wiley: Plant Defense Dale Walters 9781405175890 Herbicides and Plant Physiology, 2nd Edn Andrew Cobb & John Reade 9781405129350
Download or read book Biological Adhesive Systems written by Janek Byern and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-01-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. Herbert Waite Like many graduate students before and after me I was There are so many species about which nothing is known, mesmerized by a proposition expressed years earlier by and the curse of not knowing is apathy. Krogh (1929) – namely that “for many problems there is Bioadhesion is the adaptation featured in this book, an animal on which it can be most conveniently studied”. and biology has many adhesive practitioners. Indeed, This opinion became known as the August Krogh Prin- every living organism is adhesively assembled in the ciple and remains much discussed to this day, particu- most exquisite way. Clearly, speci? c adhesion needs to larly among comparative physiologists (Krebs, 1975). be distinguished from the opportunistic variety. I think The words “problems” and “animal” are key because of speci? c adhesion as the adhesion between cells in the they highlight the two fundamental and complementary same tissue, whereas opportunistic adhesion might be the foci of biological research: (1) expertise about an animal adhesion between pathogenic microbes and the urinary (zoo-centric), which is mostly observational and (2) a tract, or between a slug and the garden path. If oppor- mechanistic analysis of some problem in the animal’s life nistic bioadhesion is our theme, then there are still many history or physiology (problem-centric), which is usually practitioners but the subset is somewhat more select than a hypothesis-driven investigation. before.
Download or read book Plant Electrophysiology written by Alexander G. Volkov and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compiles new findings in plant electrophysiology from the work of internationally renowned experts in the fields of electrophysiology, bio-electrochemistry, biophysics, signal transduction, phloem transport, tropisms, ion channels, plant electrochemistry, and membrane transport. Opening with a historical introduction, the book reviews methods in plant electrophysiology, introducing such topics as measuring membrane potentials and ion fluxes, path-clamp technique, and electrochemical sensors. The coverage includes experimental results and their theoretical interpretation.
