Locomotion and Energetics in Arthropods

Locomotion and Energetics in Arthropods
Author: Clyde F. Herreid
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1468440640

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.

Locomotion and Energetics in Arthropods

Locomotion and Energetics in Arthropods
Author: Clyde F. Herreid
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 566
Release: 1981-10
Genre: Science
ISBN:

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.

Principles of Animal Locomotion

Principles of Animal Locomotion
Author: R. McNeill Alexander
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2006-03-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0691126348

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.

Biology of the Land Crabs

Biology of the Land Crabs
Author: Warren W. Burggren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 504
Release: 1988-04-29
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780521306904

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.

Biology of Blood-Sucking Insects

Biology of Blood-Sucking Insects
Author: Mike Lehane
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401179530

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.

Medical Insects and Arachnids

Medical Insects and Arachnids
Author: R.P. Lane
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 733
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401115540

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.

The North American Porcupine

The North American Porcupine
Author: Uldis Roze
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2009
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780801446467

"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

Comparative Physiology

Comparative Physiology
Author: K. Schmidt-Nielsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 1978-03-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0521216966

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.

Robots and Biological Systems: Towards a New Bionics?

Robots and Biological Systems: Towards a New Bionics?
Author: Paolo Dario
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 782
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642580696

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.

Osmotic and Ionic Regulation

Osmotic and Ionic Regulation
Author: David H. Evans
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 613
Release: 2008-11-18
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1000654354

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