Desert Arthropods: Life History Variations / Edition 1

by Fred Punzo

Overview

It is difficult for me to recollect a time when I was not fascinated with the very notion of a desert. Walt Disney's film, The Living Desert, which I initially saw when I was 8 years of age, provided me with my first glimpse of this wondrous yet seemingly ho stile environment. The images were hypnotic and captivating. I looked on in amazement at the promenade Cl deux of the male and female scorpions during courtship. Their rhythmic and coordinated movements as they grasped one another made them appear to glide in unis on over the surface of the sand, each individual totally absorbed with its partner. In the next minute the fern ale had suddenly and utterly transformed herself like some Jekyll and Hyde act, into an aggressive predator whose prior gregarious embrace was now a hold of death for the male. The indomitable desert grasshopper mouse, the ever sentient kit fox, the graceful shovel-nosed snake swimming in an endless sea of sand.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783642085321
Publisher:	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publication date:	12/07/2010
Series:	Adaptations of Desert Organisms
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2000
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

1 Life Histories and the Desert Environment.- 2 Embryonic Development.- 3 Postembryonic Development.- 4 Reproduction.- 5 Life Histories: Individual Case Studies.- 6 Relationship Between Life History and Behavioral Ecology.- References.

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews

"... this book is a must for libraries of ecological and entomological institutions." (Journal of General and Applied Entomlogy, 2002, Vol. 25, Issue 4)

From the Publisher