Seabirds: A Natural History

Introducing Books/ Dagestan: A Natural History, Mehrnaz Shirazi Adl

Natural history , life history , and

We report on basic natural history, life history, and diet of Priapella chamulae (Poeciliidae) from Arroyo Tres, a small creek in Tabasco, southern México. The tertiary (adult) sex ratio was heavily female-skewed, female P. chamulae produced medium-sized offspring (~2.3 mg), one clutch at a time (i.e., showed no superfetation), and relied predominantly on yolk for embryo provisioning (Matrotrop...

A Natural History of Peace

More discomfiting is the continuum that has been demonstrated in the realm of cognition. We now know, for example, that other species invent tools and use them with dexterity and local cultural variation. Other primates display "semanticity" (the use of symbols to refer to objects and actions) in their communication in ways that would impress any linguist. And experiments have shown other prima...

A natural history of vision

strictly European. This classification has certainly given her difficulties in writing her narrative histories but it lends itself readily enough to a bibliography. Perhaps the structure leaves too little to chance. It is odd to find Buffon and Walter Charleton bracketed in the same time span ('Biologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries') and counter-intuitive to search for Blumenba...

Natural History, a Master Class

Many people think we’re entering a golden age of genomics, with technological breakthroughs yielding an explosion of data along with unprecedented insights into the genes and molecules that underlie life. Personally, I find it all a bit dull and uninspiring. Perhaps this cynicism stems from a conversation I once had with a fanatical, eye-popping cladist who proudly told me, ‘‘We don’t need to s...