The aims and scope of the volume with an overview of the comparative method as applied in studying behavioral ecology and evolution, distinguishing among analogous and homologous features. This chapter briefly orients readers unfamiliar with the discipline of animal behavior to the basic types of causal explanations studied in the field. It then provides an introduction to frameworks for how behavior and conservation might be integrated in principle and in practice, situating subsequent chapters in terms of their biological basis together with applications in wildlife conservation viewed through an evolutionary lens. It outlines how the major domains of behavior concerning foraging, reproduction, and movement raise issues salient to management and policy decisions, foreshadowing challenges with respect to human–wildlife conflicts and global changes in land use and climate.

This work is a history of ideas, not a history of science. It uses the past to answer the questions of whether the Darwinian Revolution comes from ideas already prevalent in Victoria society – or is it a work of rebellion? – and whether the Darwinian Revolution was truly revolutionary – or is this a mistaken judgment made by historians and others?

For a book that attempts to explain how to understand visuals in life sciences, it seems prudent to first explain what we mean by “visual,” even if it may seem quite a common word.

In everyday conversation, “visual” is often used as an adjective and means “relating to seeing or sight,” as in “visual impression” or “visual effect.” In the context of this book, “visual” is used similarly as an adjective, but in addition, and more often, it is used as a noun. As a noun, it refers to the variety of images used in life science communication. For example, photographs are a type of visual commonly used in life science communication, and so are drawings.

The theory of evolution, as espoused by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species in 1859, was difficult to accept for religious believers whose assumptions about the world were shattered by it, but Darwin’s The Descent of Man, published 12 years later, posed even greater challenges to people who did accept it, and those challenges continue today. It has often been noted that a disorienting consequence of the Enlightenment was to force people to recognize that humans were not created at the center of the universe in the image of God, but instead on a remote dust-speck of a planet, in the image of mold, rats, dogs, and chimps. For the entirety of recorded history, moral beliefs about humans had been based on the idea that people were in some fundamental sense apart from the rest of nature. Darwin disabused us of that notion once and for all. The scientific and social upheaval that has occurred since Darwin has been an extended process of coming to terms with a unification of humans and the rest of the natural world.

The origin of life could have involved autotrophy, but this is most probably chemolithotrophic rather than photolithotrophic. There is evidence, from the natural abundance of carbon isotopes, of autotrophy involving Rubisco and the Benson–Calvin–Bassham cycle from about 4 Ga. However, other autotrophic CO2 fixation pathways could also have occurred. Evidence on the evolution of photosynthetic reactions suggests an early origin of the photochemical reaction centre, with the possibility of the occurrence of two photosystems in series (photosystem II plus photosystem I) and the possibility of oxygenic photosynthesis, before the origin of the single photosystem (reaction centre I or reaction centre II) photosynthesis in the multiple clades of anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria. The origin of photosystem II and photosystem I preceded the origin of cyanobacteria and the subsequent Great Oxidation Event at about 2.4–2.3 Ga. The occurrence of oxygenic photolithotrophy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the occurrence of the Great Oxidation Event and the Neoproterozoic Oxidation Event. There is no consensus on what other factors are involved in initiating the Great Oxidation Event and the Neoproterozoic Oxidation Event.

On our 4.5-billion-year old planet, life is perhaps as much as 3.7 billion years old, with photosynthesis and multi-cellularity (appearing dozens of times independently) around 3 billion years old. Oxygen levels began to rise some 650 million years ago or even earlier (coinciding with the Metazoan stage); plants, animals, and fungi emerged on land perhaps 480 million years ago; forests appeared around 370 million years ago; and modern groups such as mammals, birds, reptiles, and land plants originated about 200 million years ago. The geological record shows that there have been five global mass extinction events, the first of them about 540 million years ago. The records also suggest that 99% of the species that have ever existed (perhaps 5 billion in number) have become extinct.

Who does not know the most basic fact from the science of genetics, that peas and people reproduce in a similar fashion?

It is taught in high schools. Gregor Mendel discovered the fundamental scientific way that organisms breed, and it works the same way in people as it does in peas. Everyone knows that. They may not remember the specifics, with dominant uppercase A and recessive lowercase a – but they know that humans and peas reproduce basically the same way, because they were taught it, and it’s true.

Now I am certainly not going to try and convince you otherwise. But have you ever actually seen peas reproduce? Thanks to the internet, you can readily see videos of plant breeding. The videos of humans breeding, of course, are posted on more restricted internet sites.

Among the diversity of perspectives for studying the nexus of evolution and human behavior, human behavioral ecology (HBE) emerged as the study of the adaptive nature of behavior as a function of socioecological context. This volume explores the history and diversification of HBE, a field which has grown considerably in the decades since its emergence in the 1970s. At its core, the principles of HBE have remained a clear and cogent way to derive predictions about the adaptive function of behavior, even as the questions and methods of the discipline have evolved to be more interdisciplinary and more synergistic with other fields in the evolutionary social sciences. This introductory chapter covers core concepts, including methodological individualism, conditional strategies, and optimization. The chapter then provides an overview of the state of the field, including a summary of current research topics, areas, and methods. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the integral role that human behavioral ecology continues to play in deepening scholarly understandings of human behavior.

The African buffalo has interacted with human societies for millennia across its vast African range. It is part of the bestiary of the few African imaginaries and mythologies that have managed to reach us. These representations of the species in African cultures seem to have percolated more recently into the imaginaries of European cultures, especially from the angle of hunting and photographic safaris. The buffalo is also at the centre of services and disservices to different actors, providing uses but also generating conflicts in African landscapes, the species being central in so-called Human–Wildlife Conflicts. For animal health services, the buffalo represents in some instances a public enemy, influencing meat trade policies, land uses and boundaries in many parts of the continent. The African buffalo is therefore an emblem of the coexistence between humans and nature in Africa.

The framework of this book reflects the complexity of the situation of the species at different scales. To position the Little Owl in the cultural context we look at the history and cultural traditions connected to the species. We describe the taxonomy and subspecies to settle some taxonomic discussions of the species based upon major genetic, morphological and biogeographical findings. The distribution of the different subspecies and recent population estimates for the Western Palearctic are given to illustrate the geographic diversity. The habitat is described and its relationships with the species. Food as principle biotic factor delivers the crucial energy input for the birds. Abiotic factors such as breeding cavities and perches show their importance for breeding and foraging efficiency to minimize the energetic cost. Next we focus on the breeding season, discussing clutch size, hatching and fledging success in relation to the age of the birds. We then describe behavior mainly based upon two decades of webcam observations. Next we zoom in on limiting factors that influence populations in a given geographic environment, e.g., immigration, re-introduction or supplementation, and mechanisms of interaction between local populations, such as migration, meta-populations and sinks/sources. After describing the main causes for declines in the species, we summarize knowledge into a conservation and management strategy. We conclude this chapter with an overview of the key points raised, with an overview of the most important open questions and suggestions for future studies.

Information about the natural world comes from many sources. In controlled experiments, the responses of similar groups to a treatment are compared, and differences in the responses suggest that the treatment may have had an effect. Where controlled experiments would be impossible or unethical studies that compare conditions in two or more similar situations that differ in place or time may be appropriate. Statistical analysis allows investigators to evaluate the probability that observed results are due to chance. Historical records, natural records such as fossils, oral traditions, traditional ecological knowledge, and observations from citizen scientists and parataxonomists are also important. Researchers often develop models to predict how a system behaves under specified conditions. This is useful when a system, such as the Earth’s climate, cannot be observed directly. Science provides a framework within which results can be compared to predictions and conclusions can be modified as new evidence becomes available. Arguments and information about the natural world should be evaluated critically for misleading statements and potential bias.

The stone is still there in the garden. That’s what gets me. It’s not the house itself – houses decay slowly and can be preserved pretty easily, especially in Britain where even an eighteenth-century country house is not “old.” It’s not even the tree behind the house, alive when Charles Darwin still lived in his Down House, now propped up by guywires against inevitable collapse as a kind of totem of the great naturalist’s existence. If you leave the rear exit, the one that takes you to Darwin’s preserved greenhouse and the stunning flora on a pretty path lined in that particular English way of making the perfectly manicured seem somehow “natural,” you might glance to the left and see behind a small iron fence a one-foot-wide stone. A round mill stone or pottery wheel, it was, or appears to have been.

Ever since living beings arose from non-living organic compounds on a primordial planet, more than 3.5 billion years ago, a multitude of organisms has unceasingly flourished by means of the reproduction of pre-existing organisms. Through reproduction, living beings generate other material systems that to some extent are of the same kind as themselves. The succession of generations through reproduction is an essential element of the continuity of life. Not surprisingly, the ability to reproduce is acknowledged as one of the most important properties to characterize living systems. But let’s step back and put reproduction in a wider context, the endurance of material systems.

This volume focuses on the legal aspects of implementing the CITES to achieve the world’s SDGs. It provides a serious contribution to the current academic scholarly debates on the protection of listed species, by analysing key issues under the CITES that affect the design and implementation of national regulatory regimes, as well as existing policies and laws on CITES-listed species as they relate to sustainable development objectives of the country. It also examines the practical, legal, political and economic problems encountered in the attempt to implement these regulations in contemporary settings. It considers, in particular, how regulations which implement CITES can also foster sustainable development in developing countries.

There are many definitions of what is a ‘mountain’ and what is a ‘mountain bird’. In this chapter, we first assess these different definitions, and then clearly outline our rationale for choosing to define a mountain bird as bird species where at least some populations of the species somewhere in their distribution spend at least one critical stage of their life cycle above treeline. We then provide an overview of the importance of mountains to biodiversity, and compare knowledge on mountain birds to lowland ecosystems. Zonation is an important aspect of mountain ecology – we review the evidence for consistent patterns in bird richness and diversity across elevation gradients, and consider the different hypotheses that might explain these patterns. Additionally, we consider variation along the elevation gradient in some general species characteristics and the extent to which these trends vary geographically. Furthermore, we give an overview of how mountain bird communities vary seasonally, in particular considering different dispersal and migration strategies, and the extent to which the prevalence of these strategies varies according to different regions. Finally, we summarise the history of human interventions in mountains and their impacts on bird communities from pre-history until the start of the mechanized age.

The view of living systems as machines is based on the idea of a fixed sequence of cause and effect: from genotype to phenotype, from genes to proteins and to life functions. This idea became the Central Dogma: the genotype maps to the phenotype in a one-way causative fashion, making us prisoners of our genes.

“Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts!” This famous directive by Sergeant Joe Friday – apparently never actually made in this form – is from the television series Dragnet. Unfortunately, while this may be adequate for detecting and solving crime, not so elsewhere. The idea that science is simply a matter of recording empirical experience is hopelessly inadequate and misleading. Science is about empirical experience, but it is about such experience as encountered and interpreted – and with effort and good fortune – as explained by us.

This chapter examines the nature of the research conducted in and on zoos. Much of the research undertaken in zoos is concerned with the behaviour, nutrition, welfare and reproduction of animals. However, work has also been published on the history of zoos, their place in culture, their conservation role, their educational value and the interactions between people and animals in zoos. Historical trends in zoo research are examined along with taxonomic bias in the species studied: most studies involve mammals. Although zoo research is published in a wide range of journals, in recent decades a number of specialist journals have been produced.

There are several ‘enigmatic canid’ species in North America. One of them is the red wolf (Canis rufus, Figure 1.1), and another is the Great Lakes Wolf. Red wolves are seriously endangered, with a re-released population in North Carolina and breeding programmes being the last populations. Red wolves weren’t even studied closely until the 1960s, after having been hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gibbons and siamangs (termed ‘gibbons’ hereafter) are members of the family Hylobatidae and are the smallest of the apes, distinguished by their coordinated duets, territorial songs, arm-swinging locomotion and small family group sizes. They are the most speciose of the apes with four extant genera (Hylobates, Hoolock, Symphalangus and Nomascus) distributed across East and Southeast Asia. Of the 20 species, 95 per cent are considered critically endangered or endangered according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species (Rawson et al., 2011; Fan and Bartlett, 2017; IUCN, 2021).