Author: Dr. David E. Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199996776
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
"On the Wing is the first book to take a comprehensive look at the evolution of flight in all four groups of powered flyers: insects, pterosaurs, birds, and bats."--Book jacket.
Author: Robert Dudley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186340
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
From the rain forests of Borneo to the tenements of Manhattan, winged insects are a conspicuous and abundant feature of life on earth. Here, Robert Dudley presents the first comprehensive explanation of how insects fly. The author relates the biomechanics of flight to insect ecology and evolution in a major new work of synthesis. The book begins with an overview of insect flight biomechanics. Dudley explains insect morphology, wing motions, aerodynamics, flight energetics, and flight metabolism within a modern phylogenetic setting. Drawing on biomechanical principles, he describes and evaluates flight behavior and the limits to flight performance. The author then takes the next step by developing evolutionary explanations of insect flight. He analyzes the origins of flight in insects, the roles of natural and sexual selection in determining how insects fly, and the relationship between flight and insect size, pollination, predation, dispersal, and migration. Dudley ranges widely--from basic aerodynamics to muscle physiology and swarming behavior--but his focus is the explanation of functional design from evolutionary and ecological perspectives. The importance of flight in the lives of insects has long been recognized but never systematically evaluated. This book addresses that shortcoming. Robert Dudley provides an introduction to insect flight that will be welcomed by students and researchers in biomechanics, entomology, evolution, ecology, and behavior.
Author: Dmitry L. Grodnitsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
In Form and Function of Insect Wings Grodnitsky offers a comprehensive overview of the functional morphology of insect wings from the viewpoint of general biology and uses these data to help further explain animal morphology. Grodnitsky evaluates functional issues relating to insect diversification, particularly wing structure and kinematics. He discusses recent data on wing kinematics and structure from the point of view of modern insect flight aerodynamics and general evolutionary morphology. He is most concerned with the question of which features of an organism can be explained by natural selection of given functional variants and which cannot.
Author: David Grimaldi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521821490
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 790
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Book Description
Insects are the most diverse group of organisms in the 3 billion-year history of life on Earth, and the most ecologically dominant animals on land. This book chronicles for the first time the complete evolutionary history of insects: their living diversity, relationships and 400 million years of fossils. Whereas other volumes have focused on either living species or fossils, this is the first comprehensive synthesis of all aspects of insect evolution. The book is illustrated with 955 photo- and electronmicrographs, drawings, diagrams, and field photos, many in full colour and virtually all of them original. The book will appeal to anyone engaged with insect diversity: professional entomologists and students, insect and fossil collectors, and naturalists.
Author: J. W. S. Pringle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052105995X
Category : Insects
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
Author: H. Dingle
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461569419
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This volume is an outgrowth of a Symposium entitled "Evolution of Escape in Space and Time" held at the XV International Congress of Entomology in Washington, D. C., USA in August, 1976. The choice of topic was prompted by recent advances in evolutionary ecology and the apparent suitability of insect migration and dia pause as appropriate material for evolutionary studies. In the event, that choice seems amply justified as I hope a perusal of these papers will show. These Sympos ium papers hardly cover the topic of the evolution of escape mechanisms exhaustively, and I am sure everyone will have his favorite lacuna. Some of the more obvious ones are indicated by Professor Southwood in his Concluding Remarks at the end of the book. The purpose of the Symposium, however, was not complete coverage, but rather to indicate the potential inherent in insect migration and diapause for the study of evolutionary problems. In that I think we have succeeded reasonably well. These papers are expanded and in some cases somewhat altered versions of the papers delivered in Washington. This has allowed greater coverage of the topics in question. I suggested a format of a general overview of a topic emphasizing the author's own research con tributions. In general the papers follow this outline although emphases vary. Two of the authors, Dr. Rainey and Dr. Lumme, were unable to attend the Symposium. Dr. Rainey's paper was read by Mr. Frank Walsh, but Dr.
Author: Scott Richard Shaw
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616361X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Chronicles the evolution of insects and explains how evolutionary innovations have enabled them to disperse widely, occupy narrow niches, and survive global catastrophes. --Publisher's description.
Author: Nicholas C. Fraser
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781780460147
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A collection of papers reviewing selected conservation Lagerstätten for terrestrial animals and plants throughout the Phanerozoic worldwide. The synthesis details recent progress in documenting the biodiversity of such extraordinary fossil deposits and elucidating the geological conditions for and biogeochemical processes behind their formation.
Author: Xavier Belles
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128130210
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Insect Metamorphosis: From Natural History to Regulation of Development and Evolution explores the origin of metamorphosis, how it evolved, and how it is it regulated. The book discusses insect metamorphosis as a key innovation in insect evolution. With most of the present biodiversity on Earth composed of metamorphosing insects—approximately 1 million species currently described, with another 10-30 million still waiting to be discovered, the book delves into misconceptions and past treatments. In addition, the topic of integrating insect metamorphosis into the theory of evolution by natural selection as noted by Darwin in his On the Origin of Species is also discussed. Users will find this to be a comprehensive and updated review on insect metamorphosis, covering biological, physiological and molecular facets, with an emphasis on evolutionary aspects. - Features updated knowledge from the past decade on the mechanisms of action of juvenile hormone, the main doorkeeper of insect metamorphosis - Aids researchers in entomology or developmental biology dealing with specialized aspects of metamorphosis - Provides applied entomologists with recently updated data, especially on regulation, to better face the problems of pest control and management - Gives general evolutionary biologists context on the process of metamorphosis in its larger scope
Author: Andrei K. Brodsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
This is the first book on this subject since J.W.S. Pringle's classic Insect flight was published in 1957. Much has been written since on applied and ecological aspects of flight, but consideration of the question of the origin of wings and flight has been largely confined to armchair speculation in a scattered literature. To make matters worse, much of the recent empirical work has only appeared in Russian. Brodsky is a leading Russian authority on insect flight, a pioneer in the use of empirical aerodynamic techniques to unravel the mechanisms which underlie insect flight and hence its origins. By uniting fossil, structural, and phylogenetic information with his empirical studies, he draws a coherent, well-substantiated picture of the evolution of insect flight. The text is illustrated by numerous fine line drawings.
