Throughout the natural world, organisms have responded to predators, inadequate resources, or inclement conditions by forming ongoing mutually beneficial partnerships--or symbioses--with different species. Symbiosis is the foundation for major evolutionary events, such as the emergence of eukaryotes and plant eating among vertebrates, and is also a crucial factor in shaping many ecological communities. The Symbiotic Habit provides an accessible and authoritative introduction to symbiosis, describing how symbioses are established, function, and persist in evolutionary and ecological time. Angela Douglas explains the evolutionary origins and development of symbiosis, and illustrates the principles of symbiosis using a variety of examples of symbiotic relationships as well as nonsymbiotic ones, such as parasitic or fleeting mutualistic associations. Although the reciprocal exchange of benefit is the key feature of symbioses, the benefits are often costly to provide, causing conflict among the partners. Douglas shows how these conflicts can be managed by a single controlling organism that may selectively reward cooperative partners, control partner transmission, and employ recognition mechanisms that discriminate between beneficial and potentially harmful or ineffective partners. The Symbiotic Habit reveals the broad uniformity of symbiotic process across many different symbioses among organisms with diverse evolutionary histories, and demonstrates how symbioses can be used to manage ecosystems, enhance food production, and promote human health.

A comprehensive overview of symbiotic relationships between insects and microbes Insects and Their Beneficial Microbes is an authoritative and accessible synthesis of insect associations with beneficial microorganisms. Angela Douglas distills the vast literature in entomology and microbiology, as well as the burgeoning microbiome literature, to explore the full scope of insect-microbial interactions and their applications to real-world problems in agriculture and medicine. Douglas investigates how insects acquire and support their microbial partners, and examines how microorganisms contribute to insect nutrition, the defense against natural enemies, and the detoxification of natural allelochemicals and chemical insecticides. She analyzes how beneficial microbes can be harnessed to solve real-world problems in insect pest management, including strategies to suppress the transmission of viruses and microbial disease agents by mosquitoes and other insects. She also addresses the use of insects as biomedical models for effective microbial therapies treating a range of chronic human diseases, and considers how knowledge of insect-microbial interactions can promote the health of beneficial insects, especially in the context of environmental pollutants and climate change. Insects and Their Beneficial Microbes provides a much-needed conceptual framework for the growing discipline of insect-microbial interactions, and offers a wealth of insights into insect symbioses from molecular, physiological, ecological, and evolutionary perspectives.

"This book provides an accessible and authoritative guide to the fundamental principles of microbiome science, an exciting and fast-emerging new discipline that is reshaping many aspects of the life sciences. Resident microbes in healthy animals--including humans--can dictate many traits of the animal host. This animal microbiome is a second immune system conferring protection against pathogens; it can structure host metabolism in animals as diverse as reef corals and hibernating mammals; and it may influence animal behavior, from social recognition to emotional states. These microbial partners can also drive ecologically important traits, from thermal tolerance to diet, and have contributed to animal diversification over long evolutionary timescales"--Publisher by publisher.

Is the human race conclusively set for self-annihilation? As futurists prophesize, are we only decades away from extinguishing the planet? Or are we capable of changing this trajectory because of what YOU start today? Renewal is about how each one of us can: Renew ourselves at a body-mind-spirit level Renew our society and our environment and Renew the systems we operate with As of 2020, Renewal is critical, because it is our laxity that has led to the current state of rising personal illness, mindless lifestyles, social degeneration, environmental degradation, and overall moral decay. Written to serve as a practical guide for everyone’s day-to-day ‘karma,’ Renewal is set in the lives of a modern-day family. It is strung together by the charismatic Guru Pranachandra, whose discourse drives home the vital message: that the world is a mere 30 habits away from Renewal. Adopters of these habits will be the future Renewalists, who could well outnumber the Vegans, Buddhists, Technologists and Catholics in times to come. And it is these Renewalists who hold the key to save the world from annihilation.

Mutualisms, interactions between two species that benefit both of them, have long captured the public imagination. Their influence transcends levels of biological organization from cells to populations, communities, and ecosystems. Mutualistic symbioses were crucial to the origin of eukaryotic cells, and perhaps to the invasion of land. Mutualisms occur in every terrestrial and aquatic habitat; indeed, ecologists now believe that almost every species on Earth is involved directly or indirectly in one or more of these interactions. Mutualisms are essential to the reproduction and survival of virtually all organisms, as well as to nutrient cycles in ecosystems. Furthermore, the key ecosystem services that mutualists provide mean that they are increasingly being considered as conservation priorities, ironically at the same time as the acute risks to their ecological and evolutionary persistence are increasingly being identified. This volume, the first general work on mutualism to appear in almost thirty years, provides a detailed and conceptually-oriented overview of the subject. Focusing on a range of ecological and evolutionary aspects over different scales (from individual to ecosystem), the chapters in this book provide expert coverage of our current understanding of mutualism whilst highlighting the most important questions that remain to be answered. In bringing together a diverse team of expert contributors, this novel text captures the excitement of a dynamic field that will help to define its future research agenda.

Behavior and Ecology discusses the ecology and behavior of crustaceans. It presents an update and overview of most of the dominant lines of research in crustacean biology. This book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the rapidly advancing topic of how crustaceans communicate with members of the same species as well as on an interspecific basis. Chapter 2 provides a synthesis and review of patterns of movement and orientation of crustaceans in nature. Chapter 3 reviews the basic concepts in the regulation of biological rhythms, surveys rhythms in Crustacea, and then analyzes the data from an ecological perspective. Chapter 4 summarizes symbiotic relationships of crustaceans with other crustacean and noncrustacean hosts. Chapter 5 cites work on adaptation of egg and development to the environment. Chapter 6 discusses assemblages of organisms into populations and communities. This book is a valuable source for zoologists, paleontologists, ecologists, physiologists, endocrinologists, morphologists, pathologists, and fisheries biologists, and an essential reference work for institutional libraries.