This book provides an overview of the XI International Congress on Medical and Applied Malacology: “Crossing Boundaries: Integrative Approaches to Malacology”. The event was held at the State University of Rio de Janeiro between the 25th and 29th of September 2012. A number of the plenary lecturers from the conference were invited to contribute their papers to these proceedings, as were speakers whose papers were eligible for student awards. The volume contains articles on bioprospecting methods; medical malacology; aquaculture; biomonitoring; alien species; reproductive and developmental biology; interdisciplinary teaching and education; and trends in malacological research. The information contained here will convey to the general public the importance of mollusks to human and animal health, as well as their applications in various areas of knowledge.

Primary sexual traits, those structures and processes directly involved in reproduction, are some of the most diverse, specialized, and bizarre in the animal kingdom. Moreover, reproductive traits are often species-specific, suggesting that they evolved very rapidly. This diversity, long the province of taxonomists, has recently attracted broader interest from evolutionary biologists, especially those interested in sexual selection and the evolution of reproductive strategies.Primary sexual characters were long assumed to be the product of natural selection, exclusively. A recent alternative suggests that sexual selection explains much of the diversity of "primary" sexual characters. A third approach to the evolution of reproductive interactions after copulation or insemination has been to consider the process one of sexual conflict. That is, the reproductive processes of a species may reflect, as does the mating system, evolution acting on males and on females, but in different directions.In this volume, authors explore a wide variety of primary sexual characters and selective pressures that have shaped them, from natural selection for offspring survival to species-isolating mechanisms, sperm competition, cryptic female choice and sexual arms races. Exploring diverse reproductive adaptations from a theoretical and practical perspective, The Evolution of Primary Sexual Characters will provide an unparalleled overview of sexual diversity in many taxa and an introduction to the issues in sexual selection that are changing our view of sexual processes.

The Mollusca, Volume 6: Ecology provides an overview of the state of knowledge in molluscan ecology. It is part of a multivolume treatise that covers the fields of biochemistry, physiology, neurobiology, reproduction and development, evolution, ecology, medical aspects, and structure. The Mollusca is intended to serve a range of disciplines: biological, biochemical, paleontological, and medical. As a source of information on the current status of molluscan research, it should prove useful to researchers of the Mollusca and other phyla, as well as to teachers and qualified graduate students. The book contains 15 chapters, arranged into three levels of ecological perspective: (a) distributional studies; (b) physiological ecology and bioenergetics; and (c) population genetics and dynamics. A discussion of the planetary distribution of and ecological constraints upon the mollusca is followed by separate chapters on the life styles and distribution of mollusks on the deep-sea bottom, in mangroves, and on coral reefs; and the trophic and reproductive ecology of those intrinsically fascinating molluscan groups—the nudibranchs and cephalopods. Subsequent chapters present physiological ecology in land snails and in freshwater bivalves, prosobranchs, and pulmonates, with a survey of the techniques of actuarial bioenergetics as applied to nonmarine molluscs. Other chapters cover population dynamics and biology in an introduced pest species, population genetics of marine molluscs, ecogenetics of land snails, and life-cycle pattems throughout the major molluscan taxa.