How can geckoes walk on the ceiling and basilisk lizards run over water? What are the aerodynamic effects that enable small insects to fly? What are the relative merits of squids' jet-propelled swimming and fishes' tail-powered swimming? Why do horses change gait as they increase speed? What determines our own vertical leap? Recent technical advances have greatly increased researchers' ability to answer these questions with certainty and in detail. This text provides an up-to-date overview of how animals run, walk, jump, crawl, swim, soar, hover, and fly. Excluding only the tiny creatures that use cilia, it covers all animals that power their movements with muscle--from roundworms to whales, clams to elephants, and gnats to albatrosses. The introduction sets out the general rules governing all modes of animal locomotion and considers the performance criteria--such as speed, endurance, and economy--that have shaped their selection. It introduces energetics and optimality as basic principles. The text then tackles each of the major modes by which animals move on land, in water, and through air. It explains the mechanisms involved and the physical and biological forces shaping those mechanisms, paying particular attention to energy costs. Focusing on general principles but extensively discussing a wide variety of individual cases, this is a superb synthesis of current knowledge about animal locomotion. It will be enormously useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and a range of professional biologists, physicists, and engineers.

Animals have evolved remarkable biomechanical and physiological systems that enable their rich repertoire of motion. Animal Locomotion offers a fundamental understanding of animal movement through a broad comparative and integrative approach, including basic mathematics and physics, examination of new and enduring literature, consideration of classic and cutting-edge methods, and a strong emphasis on the core concepts that consistently ground the dizzying array of animal movements. Across scales and environments, this book integrates the biomechanics of animal movement with the physiology of animal energetics and the neural control of locomotion. This second edition has been thoroughly revised, incorporating new content on non-vertebrate animal locomotor systems, studies of animal locomotion that have inspired robotic designs, and a new chapter on the use of evolutionary approaches to locomotor mechanisms and performance.

Animal Locomotion: Physical Principles and Adaptations is a professional-level, state of the art review and reference summarizing the current understanding of macroscopic metazoan animal movement. The comparative biophysics, biomechanics and bioengineering of swimming, flying and terrestrial locomotion are placed in contemporary frameworks of biodiversity, evolutionary process, and modern research methods, including mathematical analysis. The intended primary audience is advanced-level students and researchers primarily interested in and trained in mathematics, physical sciences and engineering. Although not encyclopedic in its coverage, anyone interested in organismal biology, functional morphology, organ systems and ecological physiology, physiological ecology, molecular biology, molecular genetics and systems biology should find this book useful.

This book is about how animals travel around on land, in water and in the air. It is mainly about mechanisms of locomotion, their limitations and their energy requirements. There is some information about muscle physiology in Chapter 1, but only as much as seems necessary for the discussions of mechanisms and energetics. There is information in later chapters about the patterns of repetitive movement involved, for instance, in different gaits, but nothing about nervous mechanisms of coordination. I have tried to include most ofthe widely-used methods of locomotion, but have not thought it sensible to try to mention every variety of locomotion used by animals. This book is designed for undergraduates, but I hope that other people will also find it interesting. It is possible and sometimes illuminating to use complex mathematics in discussions of animal locomotion. This book includes many equations, but little mathematics. Such mathematics as there is, is simple. Discussions of the mechanisms and energetics of locomotion inevitably involve mechanics. I expect that some readers will know a lot of mechanics, and some hardly any. I have tried to help the latter without boring the former, by putting a summary of the necessary mechanics in an appendix (p. 140). References from the main text to the appendix will tell readers where they can find help, if they need it. Figures and equations in the appendix have numbers distinguished by a prefix A (for instance, Figure A.3).