Insects and Wildlife: Arthropods and their Relationships with Wild Vertebrate Animals provides a comprehensive overview of the interrelationships of insects and wildlife. It serves as an introduction to insects and other arthropods for wildlife management and other vertebrate biology students, and emphasizes the importance of insects to wild vertebrate animals. The book emphasizes how insects exert important influences on wildlife habitat suitability and wildlife population sustainability, including their direct and indirect effects on wildlife health. Among the important topics covered are: the importance of insects as food items for vertebrate animals; the role of arthropods as determinants of ecosystem health and productivity; the ability of arthropods to transmit disease-causing agents; an overview of representative disease-causing agents transmitted by arthropods; arthropods as pests and parasites of vertebrates; the hazards to wildlife associated with using using pesticides to protect against insect damage; insect management using techniques other than pesticides; the importance of insect conservation and how insects influence wildlife conservation.

This book is comprised of important contributions from expert researchers around the world concerning the biology of animals from a variety of approaches. In particular are manuscripts that deal with cellular, biochemical, genetic, reproductive, and ecological themes including various manuscripts regarding invertebrate animals. Regarding this last animal class, the science provides excellent models to study a lot of biological processes that can explain the evolution and diversity of life on the earth's surface. They are simple organisms, the studies of which can contribute to explanations of how the metabolic processes found in vertebrates and humans started and have been maintained. This book also provides results that demonstrate some effects and interactions among environmental conditions and drugs on the morphology and biochemical processes in cells, and it contains reviews concerning the interaction between pathogenic invertebrates and human diseases. The aim of these studies was to provide important results that are not commonly treated in traditional and experimental models within the current scientific scene.

Originally published in 1953, this is a classic study in animal behaviour, drawing on the author’s own extraordinary studies of insects, fish, and birds, as well as on the literature. The concept ‘community’ is taken in its widest sense to include all types of association of individuals, not only flocks and herds, but also the family, the pair, and even two animals engaged in combat. The author received the Nobel Prize for his work in this field in 1973.

Animals lead rich social lives. They care for one another, compete for resources, and mate. Within a society, social relationships may be simple or complex and usually vary considerably, both between different groups of individuals and over time. These social systems are fundamental to biological organization, and animal societies are central to studies of behavioral and evolutionary biology. But how do we study animal societies? How do we take observations of animals fighting, grooming, or forming groups and produce a realistic description or model of their societies? Analyzing AnimalSocieties presents a conceptual framework for analyzing social behavior and demonstrates how to put this framework into practice by collecting suitable data on the interactions and associations of individuals so that relationships can be described, and, from these, models can be derived. In addition to presenting the tools, Hal Whitehead illustrates their applicability using a wide range of real data on a variety of animal species—from bats and chimps to dolphins and birds. The techniques that Whitehead describes will be profitably adopted by scientists working with primates, cetaceans, birds, and ungulates, but the tools can be used to study societies of invertebrates, amphibians, and even humans. Analyzing AnimalSocieties will become a standard reference for those studying vertebrate social behavior and will give to these studies the kind of quality standard already in use in other areas of the life sciences.