The aim of the authors in writing this monograph has been to provide a comprehensive and critical, but personal account of salt glands. Papers on salt glands are scattered through a great many different journals. There is therefore a great need for a synthesis of what is known about salt glands. The means by which salt glands perform their vital function of forming and excreting a concentrated salt solution is of great biological importance in understanding salt and water relations in the cells of all living things. In addition to the basic physiology of salt glands there is consideration of their ecological importance, their interaction with other systems of the body, their role in non-marine birds and reptiles and their evolution. Salt glands have interested biologists from a wide range of disciplines. This book brings together the scattered literature and will be a convenient source of reference to those working in the field, as well as providing information for comparative studies and for teaching purposes.

The approach of this treatise is physiological throughout. In the eyes of the author it answers the rhetorical question raised by Maurice B. Visscher at the Physiology Congress in Washington D. C. in 1968: Does physiology exist? What he meant by this question was whether the fields of cellular physiology and physiology of the various organ systems had become so large that physiology as such had vanished. The firm answer is that physiology does indeed exist. Although it is important to study physiological problems at the subcellular level, it is importan- and equally difficult - to study organ regulation at the cellular level, organ interaction, and integration into the whole organism. An account of avian osmoregulation from an integrated point of view is attempted in this book. Since reading Homer W. Smith's From Fish to Philosopher and August Krogh's Osmoregulation in Aquatic Animals verte brate osmoregulation has been in the center of the author's interest. The focus was set on avian osmoregulation after personal contact with the School of Krogh when working in the laboratory of Bodil M. Schmidt-Nielsen. The fundamental concepts and isotope techniques introduced by Hans H. Ussing have been of constant inspiration. An excellent example for the study of osmoregulation at the cellular level was given by the late Jean Maetz. The writing of this book was suggested by Donald S. Farner who is thanked for thorough editorial assistance, and especially with help in the subtle semantic peculiarities of the English language.

A wealth of information on osmotic and ionic reaulation in Estuarine and Marine Animals has been accumulated over the past decades. Beyond early studies of whole-animal responses to changes in envi­ ronmental salinities, efforts have been made later on to identify, to localize and to characterize the organs and structures responsible for the control of the characteristics of the cell's environmental fluid. When considering the problem of cell volume control in animals facing media of fluctuating salinities, we are indeed dealing with two different categories of mechanisms. A first one is concerned with the control of the osmolality of the intracellular fluid, hence with the processes directly implicated in the maintenance of cell volume and shape. They have been extensively described in several recent review papers. The second category includes the processes controllin~ the charac­ teristics of the cell's environmental fluid in order to minimize the amplitude of the osmotic shocks the cells may have to cope with upon acclimation to media of changed salinities. They are localized in particular organs and structures : the so-called "caZt-transporting" epithelia. Up to now, most of the studies on salt-transportino epithe­ lia in estuarine and marine animals used the black box approach, so that little or sometimes nothing is still known on the physiological, the biochemical and the biophysical basis of the transporting mecha­ nisms as well as on the structure-function relationships.

Though physiological ecology has been a discipline since the 1950s, McNab redresses a perceived absence of a theoretical framework with a comparative, inductive approach to studying vertebrate evolution and ecology. He discusses the patterns and limits of adaptation to the environment, acclimation to temperature variation and material exchange with the environment, and the energetics of locomotion and growth. The final section treats the significance of energetics for population ecology and distribution. Includes a taxonomic as well as subject index. Suitable for advanced students and researchers in the biological and ecological sciences. The Gainesville, FL-based author is referred to by the foreword writer as a keen naturalist, but his credentials are not stated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

This classic animal physiology text focuses on comparative examples that illustrate the general principles of physiology at all levels of organisation—from molecular mechanisms to regulated physiological systems to whole organisms in their environment. This textbook is an authoritative and complete guide to the field of animal physiology which uses a threefold approach to teaching. The Comparative Approach emphasises basic mechanisms but allows patterns of physiological function in different species to demonstrate how evolution creates diversity. This approach encourages students to appreciate the underlying principles that govern physiological systems. The Experimental Emphasis helps students to understand the process of scientific discovery and shows how our knowledge of physiology continually increases and finally the Integrative Approach presents information about specific physiological systems at all levels of organisation, from molecular interactions to interactions between an organism and its environment.n included.

Deserts, whether hot or cold, are considered to be one of the most difficult environments for living systems, lacking the essential free water which ac counts for approximately 60-70% of their body mass and more than 98% of their constituent atoms {Macfarlane 1978}. Amongst vertebrates, reptiles are usually thought of as the animals most adapted or suited to such environments because of their diurnal habit, based on a need for external heat, and their ability to survive far from obvious sources of water. This impression is rein forced when one examines the composition of vertebrate faunae characteristic of deserts and arid zones: reptiles predominate and they are often the only vertebrates to be found in hyper-arid areas, such as some parts of the Sahara {Monod 1973}. I recently had occasion to examine this assumption carefully, however, and was led inexorably to the conclusion that reptiles represent a particularly successful desert group, not because of their evolution of superior adaptations, but because of their possession of a basic suite of behavioural and physiologi cal characteristics that suit them uniquely to this very resource-limited environment {Bradshaw 1986a}. These fundamental reptilian characteristics are: 1. their low rates of metabolism, compared with birds and mammals, which result in extremely low rates of resource utilisation and lead to considerable economy in the handling of water 2.