Biology

Societies must choose how they wish to deal with climate change. Not doing anything or pursuing ‘business as usual’ is likely to lead down a path that will have devastating consequences for many people, especially the world’s poor. Using a focal lens of coral reef fisheries, upon which millions of people depend on for their livelihood, this book provides a tool box of options for confronting the consequences of climate change through building local-scale adaptive capacity in societies and improving the condition of the natural resources. Building adaptive capacity will require strengthening appropriate aspects of a society’s flexibility, assets, learning and social organizations. They ways of doing this are diverse and will, of course, depend on existing local capacities and needs. Improving the condition of resources tends to require restricting or limiting society’s actions. These two broad concepts, of building social capacities and limiting certain types of resource use, interact in complicated ways, requiring coupled actions. One of the central themes of this book is that adaptation solutions are context dependent, determined in part by aspects of local resource conditions, adaptive capacity, and exposure to climate change impacts, but also by people’s history, culture, and aspirations. This book develops a framework to help provide governments, scientists, managers, and donors with critical information about the local context and develop nuanced actions that reflect these local conditions. This information can help to identify key opportunities and narrow the range of potential adaptation options that may be suitable for a particular location.

Aging has long since been ascribed to the gradual accumulation of DNA mutations in the genome of somatic cells. However, it is only recently that the necessary sophisticated technology has been developed to begin testing this theory and its consequences. This book critically reviews the concept of genomic instability as a possible universal cause of aging in the context of a new, holistic understanding of genome functioning in complex organisms resulting from recent advances in functional genomics and systems biology. It provides a synthesis of current research, as well as a look ahead to the design of strategies to retard or reverse the deleterious effects of aging. This is particularly important in a time when we are urgently trying to unravel the genetic component of aging-related diseases. Moreover, there is a growing public recognition of the imperative of understanding more about the underlying biology of aging, driven by continuing demographic change.

Allee effects are broadly defined as a decline in individual fitness at low population size or density, that can result in critical population thresholds below which populations crash to extinction. As such, they are very relevant to many conservation programmes, where scientists and managers are often working with populations that have been reduced to low densities or small numbers. There are a variety of mechanisms that can create Allee effects, including mating systems, predation, environmental modification, and social interactions among others. The abrupt and unpredicted collapses of many exploited populations is just one illustration of the need to bring Allee effects to the forefront of conservation and management strategies. This book provides an overview of the topic, collating and integrating a widely dispersed literature from various fields: marine and terrestrial, plant and animal, theoretical and empirical, academic and applied.

Ancestral sequence reconstruction is a technique of growing importance in molecular evolutionary biology and comparative genomics. As a powerful tool for testing evolutionary and ecological hypotheses, as well as uncovering the link between sequence and molecular phenotype, there are potential applications in almost all fields of applied molecular biology. This book starts with a historical overview of the field, before discussing the potential applications in drug discovery and the pharmaceutical industry. This is followed by a section on computational methodology, which provides a detailed discussion of the available methods for reconstructing ancestral sequences (including their advantages, disadvantages, and potential pitfalls). Purely computational applications of the technique are then covered, including whole proteome reconstruction. Further chapters provide a detailed discussion on taking computationally reconstructed sequences and synthesizing them in the laboratory. The book concludes with a description of the scientific questions where experimental ancestral sequence reconstruction has been utilized to provide insights and inform future research.

Construction behaviour occurs across the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom and affects the survival of both builders and other organisms associated with them. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the biology of animal building. It recognizes three broad categories of built structure: homes, traps, and courtship displays. Even though some of these structures are complex and very large, the behaviour required to build them is generally simple and the anatomy for building unspecialized. Standardization of building materials helps to keep building repertoires simple, while self-organizing effects help create complexity. In a case-study approach to function, insects demonstrate how homes can remain operational while they grow, spiderwebs illustrate mechanical design, and the displays of bowerbirds raise the possibility of persuasion through design rather than just decoration. Studies of the costs to builders provide evidence of optimal designs and of trade-offs with other life history traits. As ecosystem engineers, the influence of builders is extensive and their effect is generally to enhance biodiversity through niche construction. Animal builders can therefore represent model species for the study of the emerging subject of environmental inheritance. Building, and in particular building with silk, has been demonstrated to have important evolutionary consequences.

Animal life, now and over the past half billion years, is incredibly diverse. Describing and understanding the evolution of this diversity of body plans — from vertebrates such as humans and fish to the numerous invertebrate groups including sponges, insects, molluscs, and the many groups of worms — is a major goal of evolutionary biology. This book adopts a modern, integrated approach to describe how current molecular genetic techniques and disciplines as diverse as palaeontology, embryology, and genomics have been combined, resulting in a dramatic renaissance in the study of animal evolution. The last decade has seen growing interest in evolutionary biology fuelled by a wealth of data from molecular biology. Modern phylogenies integrating evidence from molecules, embryological data, and morphology of living and fossil taxa provide a wide consensus of the major branching patterns of the tree of life; moreover, the links between phenotype and genotype are increasingly well understood. This has resulted in a reliable tree of relationships that has been widely accepted and has spawned numerous new and exciting questions that require a reassessment of the origins and radiation of animal life. The focus of this volume is at the level of major animal groups, the morphological innovations that define them, and the mechanisms of change to their embryology that have resulted in their evolution. Current research themes and future prospects are highlighted including phylogeny reconstruction, comparative developmental biology, the value of different sources of data and the importance of fossils, homology assessment, character evolution, phylogeny of major groups of animals, and genome evolution. These topics are integrated in the light of a 'new animal phylogeny', to provide fresh insights into the patterns and processes of animal evolution.

Water is fundamental to life and to the maintenance of an appropriate environment for physiological functions at the molecular, cellular, and organismal level. Water balance is also the principal mechanism of volume regulation in animals. The physical properties of water have profound effects on all biological structures and their function. Animal Osmoregulation has three main themes. The first deals with the physical properties of water, and its interactions with proteins, lipids, and biological membranes. Solutes affect the activity of water and thus the magnitude of the gradients driving water movement through osmosis. The distribution and transport of water in biological systems depends therefore on the properties of solutes, their distribution, and their transport. The second theme involves a detailed physical description of osmosis. This is followed by an explanation of the significance of osmotic regulation in animals inhabiting a wide variety of environments. Examples are explored for marine, freshwater, and terrestrial animals. A broad phylogenetic array of animals is discussed. Thirdly, the book deals with membranes as compartmental barriers. By definition, osmosis occurs through semi-permeable membranes. Membranes also, however, play a fundamental role in energy storage, energy transduction, solute transport, and sensory physiology. This volume approaches animal osmoregulation from the perspective of the physical laws that influence the structure of biological systems. It extends these concepts to explore the diversity of adaptations in the animal kingdom that deal with osmotic challenges in a variety of environments.

From scorching, barren deserts to humid tropical forests, from deep in the soil, to high in the tree canopies, ants are everywhere! Comprising a substantial part of living biomass on earth, ants are integral to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. More than 12,000 species have been described to date, and it is estimated that perhaps as many still await classification. Their social structure provides a rich ground for exploring how division of labour affects the acquisition of resources, foraging and defensive behaviours, and coevolution with the flora and fauna with which they interact. The study of ants has led to significant advances in our understanding of insect evolution, global diversity patterns, competitive interactions, mutualisms, ecosystem's responses to change, and biological invasions. Ant Ecology explores these and other key ecological issues and new developments in myrmecology across a range of scales. The book begins with a global perspective on species diversity in time and space and explores interactions at the community level before describing the population ecology of these social insects. The final section covers the recent ecological phenomenon of invasive ants: how they move across the globe, invade, affect ecosystems, and are managed by humans. Each chapter links ant ecology to broader ecological principles, provides a succinct summary, and discusses future research directions. The Synthesis and Perspectives highlights contributions of ant ecology to ecology more broadly, and outlines promising areas for future research.

This book provides a synthesis of theoretical and empirical food web research. Whether they are binary systems or weighted networks, food webs are of particular interest to ecologists by providing a macroscopic view of ecosystems. They describe interactions between species and their environment, and subsequent advances in the understanding of their structure, function, and dynamics are of vital importance to ecosystem management and conservation. This book covers issues of structure, function, scaling, complexity, and stability in the contexts of conservation, fisheries, and climate. Although the focus of this volume is upon aquatic food webs (where many of the recent advances have been made), many other issues are addressed.

The role of genes in governing behavior remains one of the most controversial topics in human biology. Early in this century, over-eager promotion of a genetic basis for behavior led to the excesses, and ultimately the horrors, of eugenics. Subsequent reactions to these excesses, both within the scientific community and society as a whole, led to a nearly complete dismissal of a role for genes in human behavior. Slowly we come back to a more balanced view. Detailed studies of the biological basis of behavior in animals, from the simplest single-celled creatures through the most complex mammals, show that genes play an important role in guiding behavior. Studies in humans, especially those involving twins reared together or apart, indicate clearly that humans are no exception. The variability we see around us in the way humans respond in a given situation is strongly influenced by the variability in their genetic makeup. So are we powerless creations of our genes? Not at all. Guided by differing genetic makeups, we respond to our environment in different ways. But these responses, and the actions of our genes, are in turn modified by the environment itself. Behavior is the result of a balancing act between genes and the environment; between what we inherit and what we learn. To understand ourselves fully, we must understand both.