Showing 1–12 of 21 results
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The Selfish Gene (40th Anniversary Edition)
Artist/Author: Dawkins, Richard$27.00 Add to cartThe Selfish Gene has become a classic exposition of evolutionary thought. Professor Dawkins articulates a gene’s eye view of evolution – a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant work not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanised the biology community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research. Forty years later, its insights remain as relevant today as on the day it was published. This 40th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue from the author discussing the continuing relevance of these ideas in evolutionary biology today, as well as the original prefaces and foreword, and extracts from early reviews. Oxford Landmark Science books are ‘must-read’ classics of modern science writing which have crystallised big ideas, and shaped the way we think.
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The Environment: A History of the Idea
Artist/Author: Warde, Paul, Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin$65.00 Add to cartIs it possible for the economy to grow without the environment being destroyed? Will our lifestyles impoverish the planet of our children and grandchildren? Is the world sick? Can it be healed? Less than a lifetime ago, these questions would have made no sense. This was not because our ancestors had no impact on nature – nor because they were unaware of the serious damage they had done. What people lacked was an idea: a way of imagining the web of interconnection and consequence of which the natural world is made. Without this notion, we didn’t have a way to describe the scale and scope of human impact upon nature. This idea was “the environment”.
In this fascinating book, Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin trace the emergence of the concept of the environment following World War II, a period characterized by both hope for a new global order and fear of humans’ capacity for almost limitless destruction. It was at this moment that a new idea and a new narrative about the planet-wide impact of people’s behaviour emerged, closely allied to anxieties for the future. Now we had a vocabulary for talking about how we were changing nature: resource exhaustion and energy, biodiversity, pollution, and – eventually – climate change.
With the rise of “the environment”, the authors argue, came new expertise, making certain kinds of knowledge crucial to understanding the future of our planet. The untold history of how people came to conceive, to manage, and to dispute environmental crisis, The Environment: A History of the Idea is essential reading for anyone who wants to help protect the environment from the numerous threats it faces today.
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The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia
Artist/Author: Low, Tim$23.00 Add to cartForget about wilderness, Tim Low says, nature lives in our cities and gardens, exploiting everything we do. Many endangered species now live in industrial zones and cities. In our forests, native creatures have become pests. Fifteen years after publication, The New Nature continues to challenge the way we view the interactions between human beings and nature, and pushes us to review our relationship with Australia’s wilderness.
The 2017 reprint features a new preface by the author.
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Nature’s Great Migrations: Great Journeys from Around the World
Artist/Author: Taylor, Marianne$43.00 Add to cartThis beautifully illustrated book on the world’s most impressive and spectacular movements of animals, includes various species of mammals, birds, fish and invertebrates.
Twenty-five species are covered and these include iconic migrations, ranging from millions of wildebeest moving through the plains of east Africa and the annual return of the spawning salmon each year, to swarms of Monarch butterflies travelling thousands of miles and Arctic Terns flying virtually from pole-to-pole and back each year.
Perhaps less well-known but certainly no less spectacular events include the movements of the Grey Whale, Harp Seal, Osprey, Wilson’s Storm-petrel, Ruby throated Hummingbird, Hummingbird Hawkmoth, Desert Locust, Globe Skimmer dragonfly and even the Christmas Island Red Crab.
In each case there is an engaging written account, a map showing the location of the movement, and several images of the species concerned, often in spectacular gatherings as the migration is in full swing. In short this is a remarkable and eye-catching book covering some of the world’s most impressive natural history spectacles, and it will be a valuable addition to the library of any wildlife enthusiast.
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Animal Behavior (Eleventh Edition)
Artist/Author: Rubenstein, Dustin R., John Alcock$133.00 Add to cartA comparative and integrative overview of how and why animals as diverse as insects and humans behave the way that they do, linking behaviors to the brain, genes, and hormones, as well as to the surrounding ecological and social environments.
New to This Edition: New lead author, Dustin Rubenstein, widely known for his research and teaching accomplishments, is an integrative behavioral and evolutionary ecologist who studies the evolution of complex animal societies, and how organisms adapt to and cope with environmental change. A renewed focus on integration that links the evolution of behavior to neural, genetic, and physiological mechanisms A return to its classic organizational structure, with proximate mechanisms introduced before an extended discussion of the ultimate factors underlying behavior, integrating both throughout. Introduction of cutting-edge neuro and genomic research approaches, all while maintaining a focus on the theoretical aspects of the field in an explicit hypothesis testing framework. Building on the foundation of previous editions, new pedagogical features designed to engage students and aid instructors, including Integrative Approaches, Exploring Behavior by Interpreting Data, Darwinian Puzzles, and Hypotheses Tables QR codes provide students rapid access to actual audio clips of birdsongs, and high definition video clips of animal behaviors. Updated and revised artwork that features more color, a more consistent palette for figures, crisper photographs, and error bars on figures
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Camouflaged Wildlife: How Creatures Hide In Order To Survive
Artist/Author: McDonald, Joe and Mary Ann$35.00 Add to cartThis beautifully illustrated book on camouflaged animals includes some of nature’s greatest designs and is one of the most remarkable compilations of pictures on the subject ever published.
From foxes to frogfish and owls to octopuses, some of the images have to be seen to be believed in terms of the subjects’ uncanny imitations of their natural backgrounds, which often aid them in their roles as hunting predator or as prey attempting to avoid capture.
Get an antelope’s-eye view of a lion, and marvel at leaf-like bugs and green lichen-covered sloths which blend in with their surroundings. Decades of work by award-winning photographers Joe and Mary Ann McDonald are distilled down into this stunning collection of images. -
Primate Communities
Artist/Author: Fleagle, J. G. et al.$66.00 Add to cartComprehensive and unique volume exploring the differences and similarities between primate communities worldwide.
Although the behaviour and ecology of primates have been more thoroughly studied than that of any other group of mammals, there have been very few attempts to compare the communities of living primates found in different parts of the world. In Primate communities, an international group of experts compares the composition, behaviour and ecology of primate communities in Africa, Asia, Madagascar and South America. They examine the factors underlying the similarities and differences between these communities, including their phylogenetic history, climate, rainfall, soil type, forest composition, competition with other vertebrates and human activities. As it brings together information about primate communities from around the world for the very first time, it will quickly become an important source book for researchers in anthropology, ecology and conservation, and a readable and informative text for undergraduate and graduate students studying primate ecology, primate conservation or primate behaviour. -
Nature’s Great Events
Artist/Author: Bass, Karen, editor.$60.00 Add to cartOUT OF PRINT. Nature’s Great Events is a landmark television series showcasing our planet’s most spectacular natural events and the global climatic phenomena which transform entire landscapes, drawing in millions of animals and determining their fate. The series combines the epic scale of the BBC One’s “Planet Earth” with the intimate, emotional stories of individual animals as they struggle to survive.
This book closely follows the structure of the television series. In addition words, pictures, and graphics provide an eyewitness experience and reveal the mechanisms of the different events. Each chapter is set in a different location on our planet and shows how immensely powerful natural forces can drive chain reactions involving everything from microscopic organisms to entire tracts of rainforest, ultimately culminating in a spectacular natural event.
From the flooding of the Okavango Delta in Southern Africa, attracting great herds of near starving elephants into the jaws of waiting lions, to the melting of the Arctic ice disrupting hunting polar bears, both book and television series follow the fortunes of a few key characters before during and after each great event.
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The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration
Artist/Author: Heinrich, Bernd.$23.00 Add to cartThe story and science of how animals find their way home.
Home is the place we long for most, when we feel we have travelled too far, for too long. Since boyhood, acclaimed scientist and author Bernd Heinrich has returned every year to a beloved patch of woods in his native western Maine. But while it’s the pull of nostalgia that informs our desire to go back, what is it that drives the homing instinct in animals?
Heinrich explores the fascinating science behind the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory over impossible distances; how the subtlest of scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home; and how the tiniest of songbirds are equipped for solar and magnetic orienteering over vast distances. Most movingly, Heinrich chronicles the spring return of a pair of sandhill cranes to their pond in the Alaska tundra. With his marvellously evocative prose, Heinrich portrays the psychological state of the newly arrived birds, articulating just what their yearly return truly means, to the birds and to those fortunate enough to witness this transcendently beautiful ritual.
The Homing Instinct is an enchanting study of this phenomenon of the natural world, reminding us that to discount our own feelings toward home is to ignore biology itself
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Animal architects: building and the evolution of intelligence.
Artist/Author: Gould, James L. and Carol Grant Gould.$22.00 Add to cartFrom two of the world’s most distinguished experts in animal behaviour, this book is a creative and accessible approach to understanding animal minds through the structures they build. It masterfully investigates how the structure an animal builds reveals the inner workings of its mind. Beginning with instinct and the simple homes of solitary insects, and progressing to conditioning, the “cognitive map”, and the role of planning and insight, James and Carol Gould use the amazing engineering feats throughout the animal world to reach fascinating conclusions about animals’ behavioural capabilities.
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Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage
Artist/Author: Forbes, Peter.$24.00 Add to cartNature has perfected the art of deception. Thousands of creatures all over the world – including butterflies, moths, fish, birds, insects and snakes – have honed and practised camouflage over hundreds of millions of years. Imitating other animals or their surroundings, nature’s fakers use mimicry to protect themselves, to attract and repel, to bluff and warn, to forage and to hide. The advantages of mimicry are obvious – but how does ‘blind’ nature do it? And how has humanity learnt to profit from nature’s ploys? This book tells the unique and fascinating story of mimicry and camouflage in science, art, warfare and the natural world. Discovered in the 1850s by the young English naturalists Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace in the Amazonian rainforest, the phenomenon of mimicry was seized upon as the first independent validation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But mimicry and camouflage also created a huge impact outside the laboratory walls.
Peter Forbes’ cultural history links mimicry and camouflage to art, literature, military tactics and medical cures across the twentieth century, and charts its intricate involvement with the dispute between evolution and creationism. -
Don’t shoot the dog: the new art of teaching and training.
Artist/Author: Pryor, Karen.$23.00 Add to cartThe principles of the revolutionary “clicker training” method. Eight methods of ending undesirable habits – from furniture-clawing cats to sloppy room-mates. The ten laws of “shaping” behaviour – for results without strain or pain through “affection training”. Tips for house-training the dog, improving your tennis game, or dealing with an impossible teenager. Explorations of exciting new uses for reinforcement training.
