The world of crickets has long been a world of scientific adventure and human fascination. Because of their remarkable ways of communicating and because their nervous and endocrine systems are easily accessible to researchers, crickets can be studied and analyzed with great effectiveness. Starting in the 1960s, vastly improved behavioral and neurobiological techniques have brought them to the frontier of the new field of neuroethology. Here, in the most comprehensive book on crickets ever compiled, twenty-five leading scientists detail the present state of cricket research both at conceptual and at experimental levels. They tell about the manifold strategies crickets use in matching development with seasons and habitats, finding mates, and avoiding parasites and predators, and they describe the physiological mechanisms, especially the neuronal mechanisms, underlying cricket behavior. Their book is at once about communication, comparative physiology and anatomy, and environmental interaction. More than half of Cricket Behavior and Neurobiology is devoted to acoustic behavior and bioacoustics. It is intended for those interested in entomology, general and comparative physiology, biophysics, endocrinology, and chronobiology. It offers new information for behavioral physiologists and ecologists, bioacousticians, and especially neurobiologists concerned with behavior.

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Shaun D. Cain, The Journal of Experimental Biology --Book Jacket.

This book covers a broad range of topics about the cricket from its development, regeneration, physiology, nervous system, and behavior with remarkable recent updates by adapting the new, sophisticated molecular techniques including RNAi and other genome editing methods. It also provides detailed protocols on an array of topics and for basic experiments on the cricket.While the cricket has been one of the best models for neuroethological studies over the past 60 years, it has now become the most important system for studying basal hemimetabolous insects. The studies of Gryllus and related species of cricket will yield insight into evolutionary features that are not evident in other insect model systems, which mainly focus on holometabolous insects such as Drosophila, Tribolium, and Bombyx. Research on crickets and grasshoppers will be important for the development of pest-control strategies, given that some of the most notorious pests also belong to the order Orthoptera. At the same time, crickets possess an enormously high “food conversion efficiency”, making them a potentially important food source for an ever-expanding human population.This volume provides a comprehensive source of information as well as potential new applications in pest management and food production of the cricket. It will inspire scientists in various disciplines to use the cricket model system to investigate interesting and innovative questions.

Walk near woods or water on any spring or summer night and you will hear a bewildering (and sometimes deafening) chorus of frog, toad, and insect calls. How are these calls produced? What messages are encoded within the sounds, and how do their intended recipients receive and decode these signals? How does acoustic communication affect and reflect behavioral and evolutionary factors such as sexual selection and predator avoidance? H. Carl Gerhardt and Franz Huber address these questions among many others, drawing on research from bioacoustics, behavior, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology to present the first integrated approach to the study of acoustic communication in insects and anurans. They highlight both the common solutions that these very different groups have evolved to shared challenges, such as small size, ectothermy (cold-bloodedness), and noisy environments, as well as the divergences that reflect the many differences in evolutionary history between the groups. Throughout the book Gerhardt and Huber also provide helpful suggestions for future research.

Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, Second Edition, Four Volume Set the latest update since the 2010 release, builds upon the solid foundation established in the first edition. Updated sections include Host-parasite interactions, Vertebrate social behavior, and the introduction of ‘overview essays’ that boost the book's comprehensive detail. The structure for the work is modified to accommodate a better grouping of subjects. Some chapters have been reshuffled, with section headings combined or modified. Represents a one-stop resource for scientifically reliable information on animal behavior Provides comparative approaches, including the perspective of evolutionary biologists, physiologists, endocrinologists, neuroscientists and psychologists Includes multimedia features in the online version that offer accessible tools to readers looking to deepen their understanding

In most terrestrial and aquatic habitats, the vast majority of animals transmitting and receiving communicative signals are arthropods. This book presents the story of how this important group of animals use pheromones, sound, vibration, and light for sexual and social communication. Because of their small to minute body size most arthropods have problems sending and receiving acoustic and optical information, each of which have their own severe constraints. Because of these restraints they have developed chemical signaling which is not similarly limited by scale. Presenting the latest theoretical and experimental findings from studies of signaling, it suggests that close parallels between arthropods and vertebrates reflect a very limited number of solutions to problems in behavior that are available within the confines of physical laws.

Invertebrates have proven to be extremely useful model systems for gaining insights into the neural and molecular mechanisms of sensory processing, motor control and higher functions such as feeding behavior, learning and memory, navigation, and social behavior. A major factor in their enormous contributions to neuroscience is the relative simplicity of invertebrate nervous systems. In addition, some invertebrates, primarily the molluscs, have large cells, which allow analyses to take place at the level of individually identified neurons. Individual neurons can be surgically removed and assayed for expression of membrane channels, levels of second messengers, protein phosphorylation, and RNA and protein synthesis. Moreover, peptides and nucleotides can be injected into individual neurons. Other invertebrate model systems such as Drosophila and Caenorhabditis elegans offer tremendous advantages for obtaining insights into the neuronal bases of behavior through the application of genetic approaches. The Oxford Handbook of Invertebrate Neurobiology reviews the many neurobiological principles that have emerged from invertebrate analyses, such as motor pattern generation, mechanisms of synaptic transmission, and learning and memory. It also covers general features of the neurobiology of invertebrate circadian rhythms, development, and regeneration and reproduction. Some neurobiological phenomena are species-specific and diverse, especially in the domain of the neuronal control of locomotion and camouflage. Thus, separate chapters are provided on the control of swimming in annelids, crustaea and molluscs, locomotion in hexapods, and camouflage in cephalopods. Unique features of the handbook include chapters that review social behavior and intentionality in invertebrates. A chapter is devoted to summarizing past contributions of invertebrates to the understanding of nervous systems and identifying areas for future studies that will continue to advance that understanding.

ON THE FUTURE OF PERSPECTIVES When Patrick Bateson and Peter Klopfer offered me the editorship of Perspectives in 1992, the world of academic publishing was in one of its periodic upheavals. Subscriptions to series-even distinguished series such as Perspec tives-had been declining and individual volume prices had been rising, a trend that if continued could only result in the series pricing itself out of the market. In the course of the negotiations around the change of editors, the publishers offered a cost-cutting solution: change the production pattern to "camera ready" and elimi nate the costs of indexing and proofreading. While I could see the sense in this proposal, I was reluctant to accept it. Part of what I had always liked about the volumes in this series was that they were real books, intelligently proofread, nicely laid out, and provided with proper indexes. Thus, I in return offered a "Devil's bargain": the publisher should maintain the present quality of the series for two more volumes and make a renewed effort to advertise the series to our ethological and sociobiological colleagues, while I as the new series editor committed myself to a renewed effort to make Perspectives the publication of choice for writers who are trying to get their message out to the world intact and readers who are seeking clear, coherent, comprehensive and untrammeled presentations of authors' ideas and research programs.

The last decades have brought a significant increase in research on acoustic communi cation in animals. Publication of scientific papers on both empirical and theoretical aspects of this topic has greatly increased, and a new journal, Bioacoustics, is entirely devoted to such articles. Coupled with this proliferation of work is a recognition that many of the current issues are best approached with an interdisciplinary perspective, requiring technical and theoretical contributions from a number of areas of inquiry that have traditionally been separated. With the notable exception of a collection edited by Lewis (1983), there have been fewvolumes predominatelyfocused on technical issues in comparative bioacoustics to follow up the earlyworks edited by Lanyon and Tavolga (1960) and Busnel (1963). It was the tremendous growth of expertise c:()ncerning this topic in particular that provided the initial impetus to organize this volume, which attempts to present fundamental information from both theoretical and applied aspects of current bioacoustics research. While a completely comprehensive review would be impractical, this volume offers a basic treatment of a wide variety of topics aimed at providing a conceptual framework within which researchers can address their own questions. Each presentation is designed to be useful to the broadest possible spectrum of researchers, including both those currently working in any of the many and diverse disciplines of bioacoustics, and others that may be new to such studies.