Elena Tricarico – författare

Invasive alien plants and animals are known for their disruption of ecosystems and threat to biodiversity. This book highlights their major impact on human health. This includes not only direct effects through contact with the species via bites, wounds and disease, but also indirect effects caused by changes induced in ecosystems by invasive species, such as more water hyacinth increasing mosquito levels and thereby the potential for malaria. Covering a wide range of case studies from different taxa (animals and plants), and giving an overview of the diverse impacts of invasive species on health in developed and developing countries, the book is a significant contribution that will help in prioritizing approaches to controlling invasive species and mitigating their health effects. It covers invasive plants, marine species, spiders and other arachnids, ticks and dust mites, insects, mosquitos and other diptera, freshwater species (invertebrates and fishes), amphibians and reptiles, birds and mammals. Key Features Collects together the major health impacts for the first time Covers animal and plant invasive species Examines issues in developed and developing countries The broad spectrum of the analyzed case studies will ensure the appeal of the book to a wide public, including researchers of biological invasions, doctors, policy-makers and managers, and students of invasive species in ecology, animal and plant biology and public health medicine.

This book uses a wide range of case studies from different invertebrate taxa to describe the numerous forms of social recognition occurring in this large group of animals and traces the evolution of this cognitive ability. The authors provide several examples of direct (i.e. the target of recognition is a conspecific) and indirect recognition (i.e. recognition of a reliable proxy rather than an individual, such as a den or a substrate) and discuss cases of familiar recognition (i.e. an animal remembers a conspecific but cannot tell what class it comes from or recognize its identity). Class-level recognition (i.e. an animal assigns a conspecific to an appropriate class of animals), and true individual recognition (i.e. an animal both identifies and recognizes a conspecific on an individual basis) are also addressed.