Advances in the Study of Behavior presents its first thematic volume, focusing on the physiological and behavioral mechanisms underlying parental care. The book discusses parental care both within and across taxa, with coverage of invertebrates and early vertebrates, fishes, amphibia, reptiles, mammals, birds, and nonhuman primates. A running theme throughout the chapters shows that parental care is anchored to the ecology, reproductive physiology, and embryonic development of a species. Coverage also includes mechanisms of parental care, including analysis of the stimuli that parents respond to and how parental care is initiated, maintained, and terminated. Individual differences within species are also explored, examining stable differences in maternal style, how they arise, and the consequences for both mother and infant.

This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain. All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology. As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.

The natural world is filled with diverse—not to mention quirky and odd—animal behaviors. Consider the male praying mantis that continues to mate after being beheaded; the spiders, insects, and birds that offer gifts of food in return for sex; the male hip-pocket frog that carries his own tadpoles; the baby spiders that dine on their mother; the beetle that craves excrement; or the starfish that sheds an arm or two to escape a predator's grasp. Headless Males Make Great Lovers and Other Unusual Natural Histories celebrates the extraordinary world of animals with essays on curious creatures and their amazing behaviors. In five thematic chapters, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. Crump's enthusiasm for the unusual behaviors she describes-from sex change and free love in sponges to aphrodisiac concoctions in bats-is visible on every page, thanks to her skilled storytelling, which makes even sea slugs, dung beetles, ticks, and tapeworms fascinating and appealing. Steeped in biology, Headless Males Make Great Lovers points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly bizarre behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are successful ways of living. Illustrated throughout, and filled with vignettes of personal and scientific interest, Headless Males Make Great Lovers will enchant the general reader with its tales of blood-squirting horned lizards and intestine-ejecting sea cucumbers—all in the service of a greater appreciation of the diversity of the natural histories of animals.

Parental care includes a wide variety of traits that enhance offspring development and survival. This novel book provides a fresh perspective on the current state of the study of the evolution of parental care, written by some of the top researchers in the field, and taking a broad taxonomic approach.

Behavioural ecotoxicology is an emerging field dealing with the effects of environmental pollutants on the behaviour of animals. Behavioural techniques derived from experimental psychology, behavioural pharmacology and neurotoxicology are applied to detect and characterise changes in animals living in the environment exposed to various pollutants. Behavioural effects are then interpreted in an ecological context considering the long-term relevance of these changes at both the individual and population level.

Evolution is not merely a chapter in biology textbooks; rather, it is the mesh that embraces and connects every biological phenomenon; indeed, as Dobzhansky pointed out, nothing in biology could be understood without the evolutionary logic. The contents of this book highlight the importance of evolution in applied biological sciences such as agricultural, medical, environmental and the social sciences. Evolutionary science provides renewed ideas which can result in practical applications and tools that deal with current problems concerning humanity, such as disease, food production, and environmental destruction. Most of the topics in this book were discussed during the III Summit on Evolution which took place in the Galapagos Islands in June 2013, hosted by the Galapagos Institute for the Arts and Sciences and the Galapagos Science Institute, Universidad San Francisco de Quito.