American Zoologist articles from February 1998

American Zoologist archives from February 1998

Major events in the evolution of the oxygen carriers.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION The evolutionary history of the [O.sub.2] carriers in animal bloods has often been described as so capricious that, except in vertebrates, these molecules must be unimportant. In fact, this notion ignores a large body of...

Brain and pituitary hormones of lampreys, recent findings and their evolutionary significance.
February 1, 1998... BRAIN PITUITARY RELATIONS Because of its significance in the evolution of early vertebrates, lamprey endocrinology has been the subject of reviews in the past, but such reviews have been limited by the dearth of available information....

Vertebrate behavior: integration of proximate and ultimate causation.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Events during the past decade both within animal behavior and in other, related disciplines suggest that the time may be right for a more formal synthesis of what we know about proximate and ultimate causation of behavior....

Integrating proximate and ultimate causation in the study of vertebrate behavior: methods considerations.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Methods considerations are critical to the integration and synthesis of proximate and ultimate causation of behavior. We use the term "methods" here to mean several things. First, we refer to the fact that all animal...

Sexual-selection models for exaggerated traits are useful but constraining.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION An apparatus, tool or technique that opens new doors to biological questions is seductive. Witness the impact of the light and then of the electron microscope, or now of PCR. Such technology tempts scientists to frame only...

Sexual dichromatism and temporary color changes in the reproduction of fishes.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Fishes are rivaled only by birds in their display of flamboyant colors or combinations of bright hues and elaborate patterns that sometimes approach garishness. Unlike the colors of other vertebrates, the chromatophores of...

Courtship and mate choice in fishes: integrating behavioral and sensory ecology.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Whereas behavioral ecology focuses on how major categories of behavior such as avoiding predators, feeding, mating, parental care, contribute to fitness (Krebs and Davies, 1987; Sargent, 1990), sensory ecology focuses on...

Behavioral and evolutionary neurobiology: a pluralistic approach.
February 1, 1998... HOW AND WHY QUESTIONS Ernst Mayr's 1961 article, Cause and effect in biology, recognized two branches of biology, functional and evolutionary. Functional biologists ask "How" questions and study "the operation and interaction of...

Integrative studies of amphibians: from molecules to mating.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Particular areas of amphibian research represent successful models for the integration of evolutionary and physiological approaches. A prime example is the combination of neurophysiological analyses of anuran vocalizations...

On the organization of individual differences in sexual behavior.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Understanding how the individual emerges requires a perspective that integrates evolutionary outcomes and causal mechanisms. While much has been learned about the consequences of individual variation in the evolution of...

Hormonal control and evolution of alternative male phenotypes: generalizations of models for sexual differentiation.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION The complex, multiple step process by which an organism's genotype and its environment interact to produce the phenotype is a central problem of contemporary biology. Understanding this process is important for proximate...

Sexual strategy and size dimorphism in rattlesnakes: integrating proximate and ultimate causation.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Understanding the variability and diversity of living systems remains a fundamental challenge in biology. Causation in biological systems occurs simultaneously at multiple levels of organization. Progress in the...

Hormonal mechanisms of mate choice.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Mate choice is a critically important determinant of reproductive success and offspring fitness. Because of its significance in the evolutionary process, it receives much attention from animal behaviorists (Bateson, 1983;...

Song learning, early nutrition and sexual selection in songbirds.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION When formulating hypotheses about the evolution of a trait, we often ask how selection acts on the phenotypic endpoint of development, be it a behavior or other kind of trait. Recently, however, several authors have...

Ecological bases of hormone-behavior interactions: the "emergency life history stage."
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Most of us interpret "emergency" responses of animals as the "fight-or-flight" response--the massive release of catecholamines by adrenal medullary cells (chromaffin) that increase heart rate, mobilize glucose, etc., within...

Ultimate causation of aggressive and forced copulation in birds: female resistance, the CODE hypothesis, and social monogamy. (Creation of a Dangerous Environment)
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Evolutionary (ultimate or functional) hypotheses predict behavioral, physiological, and morphological traits Darwin (1871) posited that sexual selection accounted for bizarre and elaborate traits that were difficult...

Photoperiodic mediation of seasonal breeding and immune function in rodents: a multi-factorial approach.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Few animals in nature engage in continuous breeding. Presumably, the costs of winter breeding outweigh the benefits. Although this hypothesis is well-accepted, it has rarely been tested directly (Bronson, 1989; Bronson and...

Evolution of parental care in Phodopus: conflict between adaptations for survival and adaptations for rapid reproduction.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION Charles Darwin, in both The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), explicitly recognized that sexual selection could favour character traits that decreased survival if their advantage in gaining mates and...

Canid reproductive biology: an integration of proximate mechanisms and ultimate causes.
February 1, 1998... INTRODUCTION In reviews of mammalian reproductive systems, canids are most often cited as being unusual because they exhibit monogamy and paternal care (e.g., Kleiman, 1977). However, other uncommon and even unique features...

Long-Term Studies of Vertebrate Communities.
February 1, 1998... MARTIN L. CODY AND JEFFREY A. SMALLWOOD, eds. Academic Press, San Diego, California. 1996. ISBN 0-12-178075-9. This volume, the product of a symposium convened at the 1993 meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Madison, Wisconsin,...

Miniature Vertebraes: The Implications of Small Body Size.
February 1, 1998... Symposia of the Zoological Society of London Number 69. P. J. MILLER, ed. Clarendon Press/Oxford/1996. xv + 328 pp., illustr., index, US $125.00 (ISBN 0-19-857787-7). Extremes always fascinate, and few extremes have fascinated biologists...

Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology.
February 1, 1998... VASSILIKI BETTY SMOCOVITIS. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996, xxiv + 230 pp., index. $29.95 (ISBN 0-691-03343-9 cloth alk paper) Readers of this essay, if they are ecologists or geneticists, would probably agree with the...

Avian Molecular Evolution and Systematics.
February 1, 1998... DAVID P. MINDELL, ed. Academic Press, San Diego, 1997, xx + 382 pp., $84.95, (ISBN 0-12-498315-4). Birds represent one of the few large groups of organisms where knowledge of species diversity (about 10,000 living species) is nearly...

New Uses for New Phylogenies.
February 1, 1998... PAUL H. HARVEY, ANDREW J. LEIGH BROWN, JOHN MAYNARD SMITH, AND SEAN NEE, eds. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1996. xi + 349 pp. $70.00 cloth. ISBN 0-19-854985-7. $35.00 paper. ISBN 0-19-854984-9. The integration of phylogenies into areas...