Escaping From Predators

Escaping From Predators

Author: William E. Cooper, Jr

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-28

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1316368483

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When a predator attacks, prey are faced with a series of 'if', 'when' and 'how' escape decisions – these critical questions are the foci of this book. Cooper and Blumstein bring together a balance of theory and empirical research to summarise over fifty years of scattered research and benchmark current thinking in the rapidly expanding literature on the behavioural ecology of escaping. The book consolidates current and new behaviour models with taxonomically divided empirical chapters that demonstrate the application of escape theory to different groups. The chapters integrate behaviour with physiology, genetics and evolution to lead the reader through the complex decisions faced by prey during a predator attack, examining how these decisions interact with life history and individual variation. The chapter on best practice field methodology and the ideas for future research presented throughout, ensure this volume is practical as well as informative.


Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind

Author: David Quammen

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2004-09-17

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 039307630X

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"Rich detail and vivid anecdotes of adventure....A treasure trove of exotic fact and hard thinking." —New York Times Book Review For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of our existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from above—so far above that we are in danger of forgetting that we even belong to an ecosystem. Casting his expert eye over the rapidly diminishing areas of wilderness where predators still reign, the award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo and The Tangled Tree examines the fate of lions in India's Gir forest, of saltwater crocodiles in northern Australia, of brown bears in the mountains of Romania, and of Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East. In the poignant and troublesome ferocity of these embattled creatures, we recognize something primeval deep within us, something in danger of vanishing forever.


Ecology of Predator-Prey Interactions

Ecology of Predator-Prey Interactions

Author: Pedro Barbosa

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-08-11

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780195171204

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This book addresses the fundamental issues of predator-prey interactions, with an emphasis on predation among arthropods, which have been better studied, and for which the database is more extensive than for the large and rare vertebrate predators. The book should appeal to ecologists interested in the broad issue of predation effects on communities.


The North American Porcupine

The North American Porcupine

Author: Uldis Roze

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780801446467

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"Long and sympathetic watching, radio tracking, chemical analysis are all part of this naturalist's ingenious and peaceable arsenal of inquiry into the lives of porcupines."--Scientific American


Research Handbook on the Economics of Antitrust Law

Research Handbook on the Economics of Antitrust Law

Author: Einer Elhauge

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0857938096

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One might mistakenly think that the long tradition of economic analysis in antitrust law would mean there is little new to say. Yet the field is surprisingly dynamic and changing. The specially commissioned chapters in this landmark volume offer a rigorous analysis of the field's most current and contentious issues. Focusing on those areas of antitrust economics that are most in flux, leading scholars discuss topics such as: mergers that create unilateral effects or eliminate potential competition; whether market definition is necessary; tying, bundled discounts, and loyalty discounts; a new theory of predatory pricing; assessing vertical price-fixing after Leegin; proving horizontal agreements after Twombly; modern analysis of monopsony power; the economics of antitrust enforcement; international antitrust issues; antitrust in regulated industries; the antitrust-patent intersection; and modern methods for measuring antitrust damages. Students and scholars of law and economics, law practitioners, regulators, and economists with an interest in industrial organization and consulting will find this seminal Handbook an essential and informative resource.


The Red Hourglass

The Red Hourglass

Author: Gordon Grice

Publisher: Delta

Published: 2009-10-21

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0307568148

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Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home. Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live." Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.


The Chimpanzees of the Taï Forest

The Chimpanzees of the Taï Forest

Author: Christophe Boesch

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780198505075

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The chimpanzees are the closest living evolutionary relatives to our own species, Homo sapiens. As such, they have long exerted a fascination over those with an interest in human evolution, and what makes humans unique. Chrisophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Acherman undertook an incredible observational study of a group of wild chimpanzees of the Tai forest in Cote D'Ivoire, spending some fifteen years in the West African jungle with them. This fascinating book is the result of these years of painstaking research among the chimps. Chimpanzee behavior is documented here in all its impressive diversity and variety. Aggression, territoriality, social structure and relationships, reproductive strategies, hunting, tool use - each of these is given its own chapter, along with topics such as chimp intelligence, life histories, and demography. The authors take care to place their observations within the broader context of research in behavioral ecology, and to compare and contrast their findings with other important work on chimpanzee groups, such as that by Jane Goodall. The book concludes with a summary chapter relating the chimpanzee findings to our understanding of human evolution. Combining careful scientific observation with a store of entertaining anecdotes, this is a lively and readable book. It also succeeds in shedding light on some of the central questions around the evolutionary relationships between the primates, and in particular the affinity between chimpanzees and humans. 'This is a major contribution to the study of the great apes, and a significant addition to debates about human/ape evolution. It has all the makings of a classic monograph.


Biomimicry for Optimization, Control, and Automation

Biomimicry for Optimization, Control, and Automation

Author: Kevin M. Passino

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2005-09-08

Total Pages: 934

ISBN-13: 1846280699

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Biomimicry uses our scienti?c understanding of biological systems to exploit ideas from nature in order to construct some technology. In this book, we focus onhowtousebiomimicryof the functionaloperationofthe “hardwareandso- ware” of biological systems for the development of optimization algorithms and feedbackcontrolsystemsthatextendourcapabilitiestoimplementsophisticated levels of automation. The primary focus is not on the modeling, emulation, or analysis of some biological system. The focus is on using “bio-inspiration” to inject new ideas, techniques, and perspective into the engineering of complex automation systems. There are many biological processes that, at some level of abstraction, can berepresentedasoptimizationprocesses,manyofwhichhaveasa basicpurpose automatic control, decision making, or automation. For instance, at the level of everyday experience, we can view the actions of a human operator of some process (e. g. , the driver of a car) as being a series of the best choices he or she makes in trying to achieve some goal (staying on the road); emulation of this decision-making process amounts to modeling a type of biological optimization and decision-making process, and implementation of the resulting algorithm results in “human mimicry” for automation. There are clearer examples of - ological optimization processes that are used for control and automation when you consider nonhuman biological or behavioral processes, or the (internal) - ology of the human and not the resulting external behavioral characteristics (like driving a car). For instance, there are homeostasis processes where, for instance, temperature is regulated in the human body.