Joel S. Brown - Böcker

Foraging is fundamental to animal survival and reproduction, yet it is much more than a simple matter of finding food; it is a biological imperative. Animals must find and consume resources to succeed, and they make extraordinary efforts to do so. For instance, pythons rarely eat, but when they do, their meals are large - as much as 60 percent larger than their own bodies. The snake's digestive system is normally dormant, but during digestion metabolic rates can increase fortyfold. A python digesting quietly on the forest floor has the metabolic rate of a thoroughbred in a dead heat. This and related foraging processes have broad applications in ecology, cognitive science, anthropology, and conservation biology - and they can be further extrapolated in economics, neurobiology, and computer science. "Foraging" is the first comprehensive review of the topic in more than twenty years. A monumental undertaking, this volume brings together twenty-two experts from throughout the field to offer the latest on the mechanics of foraging, modern foraging theory, and foraging ecology.The fourteen essays cover all the relevant issues, including cognition, individual behavior, caching behavior, parental behavior, anti-predator behavior, social behavior, population and community ecology, herbivory, and conservation. Considering a wide range of taxa, from birds to mammals to amphibians, "Foraging" will be the definitive guide to the field.

This book presents evolutionary ecology as a unified discipline rooted in Darwin’s work, emphasizing the interplay between ecological processes and evolution by natural selection, both operating within Earth’s physical systems. While it covers core topics such as population dynamics, species interactions, and ecological succession, it distinguishes itself through its focus on evolutionary game theory, life-history strategies, and foraging ecology. Complex ideas are accessible through natural-history examples and clear, intuitive graphics with minimal mathematics. The narrative extends into applied areas—including biodiversity, climate change, human evolution, and cancer biology—demonstrating how an eco-evolutionary perspective provides a coherent framework for understanding the natural world.

All of life is a game, and evolution by natural selection is no exception. The evolutionary game theory developed in this 2005 book provides the tools necessary for understanding many of nature's mysteries, including co-evolution, speciation, extinction and the major biological questions regarding fit of form and function, diversity, procession, and the distribution and abundance of life. Mathematics for the evolutionary game are developed based on Darwin's postulates leading to the concept of a fitness generating function (G-function). G-function is a tool that simplifies notation and plays an important role developing Darwinian dynamics that drive natural selection. Natural selection may result in special outcomes such as the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). An ESS maximum principle is formulated and its graphical representation as an adaptive landscape illuminates concepts such as adaptation, Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, and the nature of life's evolutionary game.