How can geckoes walk on the ceiling and basilisk lizards run over water? What are the aerodynamic effects that enable small insects to fly? What are the relative merits of squids' jet-propelled swimming and fishes' tail-powered swimming? Why do horses change gait as they increase speed? What determines our own vertical leap? Recent technical advances have greatly increased researchers' ability to answer these questions with certainty and in detail. This text provides an up-to-date overview of how animals run, walk, jump, crawl, swim, soar, hover, and fly. Excluding only the tiny creatures that use cilia, it covers all animals that power their movements with muscle--from roundworms to whales, clams to elephants, and gnats to albatrosses. The introduction sets out the general rules governing all modes of animal locomotion and considers the performance criteria--such as speed, endurance, and economy--that have shaped their selection. It introduces energetics and optimality as basic principles. The text then tackles each of the major modes by which animals move on land, in water, and through air. It explains the mechanisms involved and the physical and biological forces shaping those mechanisms, paying particular attention to energy costs. Focusing on general principles but extensively discussing a wide variety of individual cases, this is a superb synthesis of current knowledge about animal locomotion. It will be enormously useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and a range of professional biologists, physicists, and engineers.

Animal Locomotion: Physical Principles and Adaptations is a professional-level, state of the art review and reference summarizing the current understanding of macroscopic metazoan animal movement. The comparative biophysics, biomechanics and bioengineering of swimming, flying and terrestrial locomotion are placed in contemporary frameworks of biodiversity, evolutionary process, and modern research methods, including mathematical analysis. The intended primary audience is advanced-level students and researchers primarily interested in and trained in mathematics, physical sciences and engineering. Although not encyclopedic in its coverage, anyone interested in organismal biology, functional morphology, organ systems and ecological physiology, physiological ecology, molecular biology, molecular genetics and systems biology should find this book useful.

Discovering the secrets of animal movement and what they can teach us Insects walk on water, snakes slither, and fish swim. Animals move with astounding grace, speed, and versatility: how do they do it, and what can we learn from them? In How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls, David Hu takes readers on an accessible, wondrous journey into the world of animal motion. From basement labs at MIT to the rain forests of Panama, Hu shows how animals have adapted and evolved to traverse their environments, taking advantage of physical laws with results that are startling and ingenious. In turn, the latest discoveries about animal mechanics are inspiring scientists to invent robots and devices that move with similar elegance and efficiency. Hu follows scientists as they investigate a multitude of animal movements, from the undulations of sandfish and the way that dogs shake off water in fractions of a second to the seemingly crash-resistant characteristics of insect flight. Not limiting his exploration to individual organisms, Hu describes the ways animals enact swarm intelligence, such as when army ants cooperate and link their bodies to create bridges that span ravines. He also looks at what scientists learn from nature’s unexpected feats—such as snakes that fly, mosquitoes that survive rainstorms, and dead fish that swim upstream. As researchers better understand such issues as energy, flexibility, and water repellency in animal movement, they are applying this knowledge to the development of cutting-edge technology. Integrating biology, engineering, physics, and robotics, How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls demystifies the remarkable mechanics behind animal locomotion.

Available for the first time in paperback, this volume contains text with translation of De Motu Animalium, Aristotle's attempt to lay the groundwork for a general theory of the explanation of animal activity, along with commentary and interpretive essays on the work.

This text provides an up-to-date overview of how animals run, walk, jump, crawl, swim, soar, hover, and fly. It covers all animals that power their movements with muscle, excluding only the tiny creatures that use cilia.

Optimization theory is designed to find the best ways of doing things. The structures of animals, their movements, their behavior, and their life histories have all been shaped by the optimizing processes of evolution or of learning by trial and error. In this revised edition of R. McNeill Alexander's widely acclaimed Optima for Animals, we see how extraordinarily diverse branches of biology are illuminated by the powerful methods of optimization theory. What is the best strength for a bone? Too weak a bone will probably break but an excessively stout one will be cumbersome. At what speed should humans change from walking to running? Should a bird take only big juicy worms or should it eat every worm it finds, and do birds make the best choices? Why do the males of some species of fishes and the females of others look after the young, while the young of others are looked after by both parents or neither? Is it possible that all these policies can be optimal, in different circumstances? This book shows how these and many other questions can be answered. The mathematics involved is explained very simply, with biology students in mind, but the book is not just for them. It is also for professionals, ranging from teachers to researchers.

How can geckoes walk on the ceiling and basilisk lizards run over water? What are the aerodynamic effects that enable small insects to fly? What are the relative merits of squids' jet-propelled swimming and fishes' tail-powered swimming? Why do horses change gait as they increase speed? What determines our own vertical leap? Recent technical advances have greatly increased researchers' ability to answer these questions with certainty and in detail. This text provides an up-to-date overview of how animals run, walk, jump, crawl, swim, soar, hover, and fly. Excluding only the tiny creatures that use cilia, it covers all animals that power their movements with muscle--from roundworms to whales, clams to elephants, and gnats to albatrosses. The introduction sets out the general rules governing all modes of animal locomotion and considers the performance criteria--such as speed, endurance, and economy--that have shaped their selection. It introduces energetics and optimality as basic principles. The text then tackles each of the major modes by which animals move on land, in water, and through air. It explains the mechanisms involved and the physical and biological forces shaping those mechanisms, paying particular attention to energy costs. Focusing on general principles but extensively discussing a wide variety of individual cases, this is a superb synthesis of current knowledge about animal locomotion. It will be enormously useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and a range of professional biologists, physicists, and engineers.

This book addresses how the general principles of biology influence the human capacity for locomotion, and, conversely, how understanding the nature of muscular activity might provide insights into the basic nature of living beings. Through a series of essays, the book relates the evolutionary basis of animal locomotion to recognizing the determinants of exercise capacity. While raising more questions than providing answers, the discussions will assume that without knowing the correct questions to ask, the answers will not be forthcoming. At the root of this book lies the central query: what is it that separates the principles governing the function of living beings from those that dictate the inanimate world? The discussions here address this issue from the expectation that clues to the answer can be obtained through understanding adaptations to the stresses imposed by physical exercise. As such, the book provides thought-provoking analyses of the biological basis of locomotion that will stimulate future efforts to understand these phenomena.