I was asked to introduce this volume by examining "why a knowledge of ecosys tem functioning can contribute to understanding species activities, dynamics, and assemblages." I have found it surprisingly difficult to address this topic. On the one hand, the answer is very simple and general: because all species live in ecosystems, they are part of and dependent on ecosystem processes. It is impossible to understand the abundance and distribution of populations and the species diversity and composition of communities without a knowledge of their abiotic and biotic environments and of the fluxes of energy and mat ter through the ecosystems of which they are a part. But everyone knows this. It is what ecology is all about (e.g., Likens, 1992). It is why the discipline has retained its integrity and thrived, despite a sometimes distressing degree of bickering and chauvinism among its various subdisciplines: physiological, be havioral, population, community, and ecosystem ecology.

A straightforward, easy-to-understand book that teaches you how to directly communicate with animals. Animal Talk teaches you how to open the door to your animal friends’ hearts and minds without resorting to magic tricks or wishful thinking. Every creature can be reached through telepathic communication—from your tabby cat or cockatiel to the wasps that build nests in the eaves of your home or even the common flea—you just have to be open to the idea, and mind-to-mind communication will be in your grasp. In addition to an entire chapter devoted to teaching people how to develop mind-to-mind communication with animals, Animal Talk includes a discussion of freedom, control, and obedience, understanding behaviors from the animal’s point of view, how to handle upsets between animals, tips on nutrition for healthier pets, and the special relationship between animals and children.

This book critically evaluates cryptic species - a growing trend in taxonomy - and their importance for evolutionary biology.

Food webs hold a central place in ecology. They describe which organisms feed on which others in natural habitats. This book describes recently discovered empirical regularities in real food webs: it proposes a novel theory unifying many of these regularities, as well as extensive empirical data. After a general introduction, reviewing the empirical and theoretical discoveries about food webs, the second portion of the book shows that community food webs obey several striking phenomenological regularities. Some of these unify, regardless of habitat. Others differentiate, showing that habitat significantly influences structure. The third portion of the book presents a theoretical analysis of some of the unifying empirical regularities. The fourth portion of the book presents 113 community food webs. Collected from scattered sources and carefully edited, they are the empirical basis for the results in the volume. The largest available set of data on community food webs provides a valuable foundation for future studies of community food webs. The book is intended for graduate students, teachers and researchers primarily in ecology. The theoretical portions of the book provide materials useful to teachers of applied combinatorics, in particular, random graphs. Researchers in random graphs will find here unsolved mathematical problems.