Bernd Heinrich's widely praised Bumblebee Economics set a high standard for scientifically accurate yet gracefully articulate writing about nature's ingenious patterns, specifically thermoregulation. Hot-Blooded Insects takes a giant step forward by presenting an overview of what is now known about thermoregulation in all of the major insect groups, offering new insights on physiology, ecology, and evolution.

The book is richly illustrated by the author's exquisite sketches. By describing the environmental opportunities and challenges faced by moths and butterflies, grasshoppers and locusts, dungball rollers and other beetles, a wide range of bees, and other insects, Heinrich explains their dazzling variety of physiological and behavioral adaptations to what, for them, is a world of violent extremes of temperature. These mechanisms are apparent only through precise observations, but the small body size of insects poses large technical difficulties in whole-animal experiments, engendering controversy about the reliability of the data thus derived. Emphasizing an experimental approach, Heinrich pinpoints where he believes studies have gone astray, describing in detail both groundbreaking experiments and those which leave a reasonable doubt about the mechanism being interpreted. He reviews relevant work on the major taxa to show the underlying patterns that draw diversity together, opines on current controversies, and identifies questions that call for further study.

Physiologists, ecologists, entomologists, and zoologists—in fact, all biologists—will be stimulated and challenged to further research by this masterly synthesis of a new field; it will also appeal to informed readers interested in general science.

Throughout his remarkable career, Donald Pfaff has demonstrated that by choosing problems and methods with care, biologists can study the molecular mechanisms of brains more complex than those of fruit flies, snails, roundworms, and other invertebrates. His half century in the lab, starting with his discovery of hormone receptors in the brains of mammals and leading to the first detailed account of a neural circuit for mammalian behavior, puts him in a unique position to survey the origins and development of behavioral neurobiology and the current state of research. How the Vertebrate Brain Regulates Behavior offers a close-up, conversational perspective on scientific struggles and successes throughout a fifty-year quest to understand how behavior is regulated in a complex organism.

In graduate school, when Pfaff expressed a desire to study behavioral regulation, his advisor suggested focusing on hormones. Pfaff’s investigation into the hormonal basis of female sexual behavior in laboratory rats led him to a comprehensive appreciation of how hormone-dependent neurons work through neural circuits to produce discrete behaviors among all vertebrates. This breakthrough, along with other researchers’ findings, established a link between molecular biology and neuroscience that opened up a fruitful new field of inquiry.

Pfaff’s approach is to focus on one solvable problem and explore it from many angles. He begins with a single observed behavior and traces its regulation through a series of biological mechanisms—from hormones to genes to neural circuits. Pfaff’s relentless pursuit of his goals continues to inspire neuroscientists today.

Hunger is universal among animals. It has been more thoroughly studied in the black blowfly than virtually any other creature except, possibly, man and the white rat. This book is an exploration of what we mean when we say that an animal is "hungry"; it analyzes the ethological concepts of motivation and drive as tested in extensive and elegant experiments on blowflies. The fly, then, is incidental; concepts and experimental techniques for evaluating them are the main subject.

With a clarity and wit rarely found in scientific prose, the author tells the story of all the research that has been carried out with the blowfly. In so doing, he traces the development of ideas and methods employed in experimental physiology. He illustrates an approach to the study of animal behavior that is based upon analysis of underlying mechanisms.

And yet, there is much to learn about flies from this book. It is the most complete book on blowfly physiology, exclusive of endocrinology; thus entomologists will find it indispensable. Sensory physiologists will discover that it details all the classic and contemporary work on the chemical senses of insects. Behavioral biologists will want it as an analytical case history of feeding behavior. Physiological psychologists will encounter a discussion of familiar problems—solved by quite a different evolutionary approach than the rat's. And the general reader interested in animals will find a readable and entertaining view of one of the most challenging branches of biology. With this book, the blowfly joins the herring gull as one of the most accessible and understandable—and even likeable—of animal species.