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1445 books match the query 'Life Sciences' and 386 start with t

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Tadpoles

Edited by Roy W. McDiarmid and Ronald Altig

University of Chicago Press, 1999

In our own juvenile stage, many of us received our wide-eyed introduction to the wonders of nature by watching the metamorphosis of swimming tadpoles into leaping frogs and toads. The recent alarming declines in amphibian populations worldwide and the suitability of amphibians for use in answering research questions in disciplines as diverse as molecular systematics, animal behavior, and evolutionary biology have focused enormous attention on tadpoles. Despite this popular and scientific interest, relatively little is known about these fascinating creatures.

In this indispensable reference, leading experts on tadpole biology relate what we currently know about tadpoles and what we might learn from them in the future. Tadpoles provides detailed summaries of tadpole morphology, development, behavior, ecology, and environmental physiology; explores the evolutionary consequences of the tadpole stage; synthesizes available information on their biodiversity; and presents a standardized terminology and an exhaustive literature review of tadpole biology.

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Taking Flight

A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America

Michael Edmonds

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018

A dynamic account of ornithological history in America’s heartland.

Today, more than fifty million Americans traipse through wetlands at dawn, endure clouds of mosquitoes, and brave freezing autumn winds just to catch a glimpse of a bird. The human desire to connect with winged creatures defies age and generation. In the Midwest, humans and birds have lived together for more than twelve thousand years. Taking Flight explores how and why people have worshipped, feared, studied, hunted, eaten, and protected the birds that surrounded them.

Author and birder Michael Edmonds has combed archaeological reports, missionaries’ journals, travelers’ letters, early scientific treatises, the memoirs of American Indian elders, and the folklore of hunters, farmers, and formerly enslaved people throughout the Midwest to reveal how our ancestors thought about the very same birds we see today. Whether you’re a casual bird-watcher, a hard-core life-lister, or simply someone who loves the outdoors, you’ll look at birds differently after reading this book.

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Tangled Trees

Phylogeny, Cospeciation, and Coevolution

Edited by Roderic D. M. Page

University of Chicago Press, 2002

In recent years, the use of molecular data to build phylogenetic trees and sophisticated computer-aided techniques to analyze them have led to a revolution in the study of cospeciation. Tangled Trees provides an up-to-date review and synthesis of current knowledge about phylogeny, cospeciation, and coevolution. The opening chapters present various methodological and theoretical approaches, ranging from the well-known parsimony approach to "jungles" and Bayesian statistical models. Then a series of empirical chapters discusses detailed studies of cospeciation involving vertebrate hosts and their parasites, including nematodes, viruses, and lice. Tangled Trees will be welcomed by researchers in a wide variety of fields, from parasitology and ecology to systematics and evolutionary biology.

Contributors:
Sarah Al-Tamimi, Michael A. Charleston, Dale H. Clayton, James W. Demastes, Russell D. Gray, Mark S. Hafner, John P. Huelsenbeck, J.-P. Hugot, Kevin P. Johnson, Peter Kabat, Bret Larget, Joanne Martin, Yannis Michalakis, Roderic D. M. Page, Ricardo L. Palma, Adrian M. Paterson, Susan L. Perkins, Andy Purvis, Bruce Rannala, David L. Reed, Fredrik Ronquist, Theresa A. Spradling, Jason Taylor, Michael Tristem

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Tarsiers

Past, Present, and Future

Wright, Patricia C.

Rutgers University Press, 2003

Tarsiiformes, or tarsiers for short, are a group of living species of special interest to primatologists because their combination of derived and ancient characters make them pivotal to understanding the roots of primate evolution. These small-bodied, nocturnal, solitary creatures resemble lower primates in their behavior but genetically, DNA evidence aligns them more closely with higher primates, such as monkeys, apes, and humans. These astounding creatures exhibit an ability found in no other living mammal¾they can turn their heads 180 degrees in either direction to see both prey and predators. The world’s only exclusive carnivorous primate, they eat live food (primarily insects, but the occasional vertebrate, such as lizards, snakes, or frogs will also do). This unique combination of behavior and anatomy makes the tarsier an especially interesting and controversial animal for study among primate behaviorists, evolutionists, and taxonomists, who view the tarsiers as “living fossils” that link past and present, lower and higher, primates in the long chain of evolutionary history.

This new volume presents alternative and contrasting perspectives on the most debated questions that have arisen in tarsier studies. Top researchers bring together perspectives from anatomical, behavioral, genetic, and conservation studies in this new and exciting addition to the understanding of primate evolution.

This book is a volume in the Rutgers Series on Human Evolution, edited by Robert Trivers, Lee Cronk, Helen Fischer, and Lionel Tiger.

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Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation

Adam Laats and Harvey Siegel

University of Chicago Press, 2016

No fight over what gets taught in American classrooms is more heated than the battle over humanity’s origins. For more than a century we have argued about evolutionary theory and creationism (and its successor theory, intelligent design), yet we seem no closer to a resolution than we were in Darwin’s day. In this thoughtful examination of how we teach origins, historian Adam Laats and philosopher Harvey Siegel offer crucial new ways to think not just about the evolution debate but how science and religion can make peace in the classroom.

Laats and Siegel agree with most scientists: creationism is flawed, as science. But, they argue, students who believe it nevertheless need to be accommodated in public school science classes. Scientific or not, creationism maintains an important role in American history and culture as a point of religious dissent, a sustained form of protest that has weathered a century of broad—and often dramatic—social changes. At the same time, evolutionary theory has become a critical building block of modern knowledge. The key to accommodating both viewpoints, they show, is to disentangle belief from knowledge. A student does not need to believe in evolution in order to understand its tenets and evidence, and in this way can be fully literate in modern scientific thought and still maintain contrary religious or cultural views. Altogether, Laats and Siegel offer the kind of level-headed analysis that is crucial to finding a way out of our culture-war deadlock.

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Techniques for Pollination Biologists

Carol A. Kearns

University Press of Colorado, 1993

Techniques for Pollination Biologists is the first book to incorporate all techniques published in the pollination literature as well as unpublished methods compiled from practicing pollination biologists. The bibliography includes 1,200 references from more than 200 journals, plus books and previously unpublished materials. Appendices list sources for all the equipment and chemicals needed.

This book presents techniques such as fluorescence microscopy to examine pollen tubes, high-pressure liquid chromatography for nectar analysis, and using particle counters to count pollen grains and nuclear magnetic resonance for floral odor analysis. In addition to these sophisticated methods, basic techniques are described for labeling plants, manipulating flowers, marking or excluding, and designing simple but elegant experiments with small budgets. The book also examines potential pitfalls for pollination studies and offers cautionary advice about designing and implementing different types of pollination experiments.

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The Accidental Species

Misunderstandings of Human Evolution

Henry Gee

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being “animal” and started being “human.” In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe.

Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world—they are not, indeed, unique to our species.

The Accidental Species combines Gee’s firsthand experience on the editorial side of many incredible paleontological findings with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution—the key is not what’s missing, but how we’re linked.

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The Age of Everything

How Science Explores the Past

Matthew Hedman

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Taking advantage of recent advances throughout the sciences, Matthew Hedman brings the distant past closer to us than it has ever been. Here, he shows how scientists have determined the age of everything from the colonization of the New World over 13,000 years ago to the origin of the universe nearly fourteen billion years ago.

Hedman details, for example, how interdisciplinary studies of the Great Pyramids of Egypt can determine exactly when and how these incredible structures were built. He shows how the remains of humble trees can illuminate how the surface of the sun has changed over the past ten millennia. And he also explores how the origins of the earth, solar system, and universe are being discerned with help from rocks that fall from the sky, the light from distant stars, and even the static seen on television sets.

Covering a wide range of time scales, from the Big Bang to human history, The Age of Everything is a provocative and far-ranging look at how science has determined the age of everything from modern mammals to the oldest stars, and will be indispensable for all armchair time travelers.

“We are used to being told confidently of an enormous, measurable past: that some collection of dusty bones is tens of thousands of years old, or that astronomical bodies have an age of some billions. But how exactly do scientists come to know these things? That is the subject of this quite fascinating book. . . . As told by Hedman, an astronomer, each story is a marvel of compressed exegesis that takes into account some of the most modern and intriguing hypotheses.”—Steven Poole, Guardian

“Hedman is worth reading because he is careful to present both the power and peril of trying to extract precise chronological data. These are all very active areas of study, and as you read Hedman you begin to see how researchers have to be both very careful and incredibly audacious, and how much of our understanding of ourselves—through history, through paleontology, through astronomy—depends on determining the age of everything.”—Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe

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The Alewives' Tale

The Life History and Ecology of River Herring in the Northeast

Barbara Brennessel

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

While on vacation in 1980, biologist Barbara Brennessel and her family came across an amazing sight: hundreds of small silver fish migrating from the Atlantic Ocean, across a channel connecting two ponds in the town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod. She later learned that these tiny river herring were important for the ecology and economy of the region and that volunteers were counting fewer and fewer fish migrating each year.

The Alewives' Tale describes the plight of alewives and blueback herring, two fish species that have similar life histories and are difficult to distinguish by sight. Collectively referred to as river herring, they have been economically important since colonial times as food, fertilizer, and bait. In recent years they have attracted much attention from environmentalists, especially as attempts are being made, on and beyond Cape Cod, to restore the rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, and estuaries that are crucial for their reproduction and survival.

Brennessel provides an overview of the biology of the fish—from fertilized eggs to large schools of adults that migrate in the Atlantic Ocean—while describing the habitats at different stages of their life history. She explores the causes of the dramatic decline of river herring since the mid-twentieth century and the various efforts to restore these iconic fish to the historic populations that treated many onlookers to spectacular inland migrations each spring.

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The Amboseli Elephants

A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal

Edited by Cynthia J. Moss, Harvey Croze, and Phyllis C. Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia. Aristotle wrote of them with awe; Hannibal used them in warfare; and John Donne called the elephant “Nature’s greatest masterpiece. . . . The only harmless great thing.” Their ivory has been sought after and treasured in most cultures, and they have delighted zoo and circus audiences worldwide for centuries. But it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that people started to take an interest in elephants in the wild, and some of the most important studies of these intelligent giants have been conducted at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

The Amboseli Elephants is the long-awaited summation of what’s been learned from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP)—the longest continuously running elephant research project in the world. Cynthia J. Moss and Harvey Croze, the founders of the AERP, and Phyllis C. Lee, who has been closely involved with the project since 1982, compile more than three decades of uninterrupted study of over 2,500 individual elephants, from newborn calves to adult bulls to old matriarchs in their 60s. Chapters explore such topics as elephant ecosystems, genetics, communication, social behavior, and reproduction, as well as exciting new developments from the study of elephant minds and cognition. The book closes with a view to the future, making important arguments for the ethical treatment of elephants and suggestions to aid in their conservation.

The most comprehensive account of elephants in their natural environment to date, The Amboseli Elephants will be an invaluable resource for scientists, conservationists, and anyone interested in the lives and loves of these extraordinary creatures.

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The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation

Daniel J. Lebbin, Michael J. Parr, and George H. Fenwick

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Whether we live in cities, in the suburbs, or in the country, birds are ubiquitous features of daily life, so much so that we often take them for granted. But even the casual observer is aware that birds don’t fill our skies in the number they once did. That awareness has spawned conservation action that has led to notable successes, including the recovery of some of the nation’s most emblematic species, such as the Bald Eagle, Brown Pelican, Whooping Crane, and Peregrine Falcon. Despite this, a third of all American bird species are in trouble—in many cases, they’re in imminent danger of extinction. The most authoritative account ever published of the threats these species face, The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation will be the definitive book on the subject.

The Guide presents for the first time anywhere a classification system and threat analysis for bird habitats in the United States, the most thorough and scientifically credible assessment of threats to birds published to date, as well as a new list of birds of conservation concern. Filled with beautiful color illustrations and original range maps, the Guide is a timely, important, and inspiring reference for birders and anyone else interested in conserving North America’s avian fauna. But this book is far more than another shout of crisis. The Guide also lays out a concrete and achievable plan of long-term action to safeguard our country’s rich bird life. Ultimately, it is an argument for hope. Whether you spend your early weekend mornings crouched in silence with binoculars in hand, hoping to check another species off your list, or you’ve never given much thought to bird conservation, you’ll appreciate the visual power and intellectual scope of these pages.

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