Invertebrates are not ‘simple animals’, but they are indeed masters of economy: their small nervous systems contain many fewer nerve cells than those of even the tiniest vertebrates, yet these animals solve all of the same survival problems, can live in highly organized societies and can communicate complex messages. The goal of this article is to outline general features of the nervous systems...

The authors are favored with a tidy, literate style, and the book makes straightforward reading. Illustrations are provided of each condition described and of the use of special techniques such as gel diffusion and immunofluorescence. These are of average quality, but are excellent when derived from the authors' own work, as on Sj6gren's disease. Each chapter has a fairly inclusive bibliography...

Ecological immunology is a rapidly expanding field that examines the causes and consequences of variation in immune function in the context of evolution and of ecology. Millions of invertebrate species rely solely on innate immunity, compared with only 45,000 vertebrate species that rely additionally on an acquired immune system. Despite this difference in diversity, most studies of ecological ...

Both glycerol and glutaraldehyde, the two most commonly used chemical aids in freeze-fractue studies, have been shown individually to affect the structure of certain membranes as observed in freeze-fracture replicas. The present investigation studied the effect of glycerol on the gap junctions found in a number of tissues from several invertebrate phyla. Glycerol was shown, in some of these tis...

characterized by deficits in social communication and interaction, impaired language development, and stereotyped repetitive behaviors. The broader category of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) includes individuals with subsets of these symptoms (Geschwind and Levitt, 2007). The prevalence of autism in the USA has increased since the inception of the diagnosis in the 1980s – to about 1 in every ...

Fundamental to the scientific method is the use of controls or control conditions against which results obtained under test conditions are compared. In field studies, all variables cannot be controlled and replicates cannot be randomly assigned to treatments, so an attempt is made to choose test and control conditions (often represented by different sites) that are as similar as possible; the v...

The neurological movement disorder dystonia is an umbrella term for a heterogeneous group of related conditions where at least 20 monogenic forms have been identified. Despite the substantial advances resulting from the identification of these loci, the function of many DYT gene products remains unclear. Comparative genomics using simple animal models to examine the evolutionarily conserved fun...

Animals sustain their life by accumulating the necessary energy from their environment, requiring the continuous acquisition of information with their sensory systems. The prime sensory instrument of many animals is the visual system, with the photoreceptors in the retina as the main elements sampling the visual information. To gain insight into the spatial and spectral properties of the photor...

Mutual trophic interactions between contiguous habitats have remained poorly understood despite their potential significance for community maintenance in ecological landscapes. In a deciduous forest and stream ecotone, aquatic insect emergence peaked around spring, when terrestrial invertebrate biomass was low. In contrast, terrestrial invertebrate input to the stream occurred primarily during ...