Animal Body Size

Galileo wrote that “nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones”—a statement that wonderfully captures a long-standing scientific fascination with body size. Why are organisms the size that they are? And what determines their optimum size? This volume explores animal body size from a macroecological perspective, examining species, populations, and other large groups of animals in order to uncover the patterns and causal mechanisms of body size throughout time and across the globe. The chapters represent diverse scientific perspectives and are divided into two sections. The first includes chapters on insects, snails, birds, bats, and terrestrial mammals and discusses the body size patterns of these various organisms. The second examines some of the factors behind, and consequences of, body size patterns and includes chapters on community assembly, body mass distribution, life history, and the influence of flight on body size.

Describes in detail how the physical size of an organism affects its biology. Presents the largest single compilation of inter-specific size relations and instructs the reader on their comparison, combination, and criticism.

This book is about the importance of animal size. We tend to think of animal function in chemical terms and talk of water, salts, proteins, enzymes, oxygen, energy, and so on. We should not forget, however, that physical laws are equally important, for they determine rates of diffusion and heat transfer, transfer of force and momentum, the strength of structures, the dynamics of locomotion, and other aspects of the functioning of animal bodies. Physical laws provide possibilities and opportunities for an organism, yet they also impose constraints, setting limits to what is physically possible. This book aims to give an understanding of these rules because of their profound implications when we deal with animals of widely different size and scale. The reader will find that the book raises many questions. Remarkable and puzzling information makes it read a little like a detective story, but the last chapter, instead of giving the final solution, neither answers all questions nor provides one great unifying principle.

Zoologist provides a quantitative baseline for comparative zoology and demonstrates the value of allometric correlations as an analytical tool. New Introduction. References.

An account of the limitations and advantages conferred by large body size.

Concepts of Biology is designed for the single-semester introduction to biology course for non-science majors, which for many students is their only college-level science course. As such, this course represents an important opportunity for students to develop the necessary knowledge, tools, and skills to make informed decisions as they continue with their lives. Rather than being mired down with facts and vocabulary, the typical non-science major student needs information presented in a way that is easy to read and understand. Even more importantly, the content should be meaningful. Students do much better when they understand why biology is relevant to their everyday lives. For these reasons, Concepts of Biology is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand.We also strive to show the interconnectedness of topics within this extremely broad discipline. In order to meet the needs of today's instructors and students, we maintain the overall organization and coverage found in most syllabi for this course. A strength of Concepts of Biology is that instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Concepts of Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand--and apply--key concepts.

Pharmacokinetics, the study of the movement of chemicals within the body, is a vital tool in assessing the risk of exposure to environmental chemicals. This bookâ€"a collection of papers authored by experts in academia, industry, and governmentâ€"reviews the progress of the risk-assessment process and discusses the role of pharmacokinetic principles in evaluating risk. In addition, the authors discuss software packages used to analyze data and to build models simulating biological phenomena. A summary chapter provides a view of trends in pharmacokinetic modeling and notes some prospective fields of study.

Contemporary research in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, or 'evo-devo', has to date been predominantly devoted to interpreting basic features of animal architecture in molecular genetics terms. Considerably less time has been spent on the exploitation of the wealth of facts and concepts available from traditional disciplines, such as comparative morphology, even though these traditional approaches can continue to offer a fresh insight into evolutionary developmental questions. The Development of Animal Form aims to integrate traditional morphological and contemporary molecular genetic approaches and to deal with post-embryonic development as well. This approach leads to unconventional views on the basic features of animal organization, such as body axes, symmetry, segments, body regions, appendages and related concepts. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in evolutionary and developmental biology, as well as to those in related areas of cell biology, genetics and zoology.