Download Free Evolution Of Fish Species Flocks Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Evolution Of Fish Species Flocks and write the review.

A collection of twenty-eight essays, five previously unpublished, grouped into nine categories: Philosophy, Natural Selection, Adaptation, Darwin, Diversity, Species, Speciation, Macroevolution, and Historical Perspective. The book, Ernst Mayr notes in the Foreword, is an attempt "to strengthen the bridge between biology and philosophy, and point to the new direction in which a new philosophy of biology will move."
With more than 15,000 species, nearly a quarter of the total number of vertebrate species on Earth, freshwater fishes are extremely varied. They include the largest fish species, the beluga at over 7 meters long, and the smallest, the Paedocypris at just 8 millimeters, as well as the carnivorous, such as the piranha, and the calm, such as the Chinese algae eater. Certain species evolve rapidly, cichlids for example, while others transform very slowly, like lungfish. The fossils of these animals are very diverse in nature, sometimes just small scattered bones where sites correspond to ancient river beds or magnificent fossils of entire fish where there was once a lake. This book covers the history of these fishes over the last 250 million years by exploring the links between their biological evolution and the paleogeographic and environmental transformations of our planet, whether these be gradual or sudden. Gathers and synthetizes data from a vast number of publications regarding past freshwater assemblages and several fish lineages that invaded freshwaters Describes the work of the author's own team, concerning fauna from the Cretaceous of France, Morocco, and Thailand Presents the recent results of the tempo of diversification in freshwater environments and the evolutionary histories of clades and gar lineages
The cichlid fishes are an important group, being widely used in scientific research and as popular fish with aquarists. This group contains mainly small species which adjust quickly to captivity, exhibiting a readiness to breed and long periods of parental care for the young. This books comprehensive volume describes the current knowledge on the behaviour and ecology of the cichlid fishes.
Ancient lakes are exceptional freshwater environments that have continued to exist for hundreds of thousands of years. They have long been recognized as centres of biodiversity and hotspots of evolution. During recent decades, speciation in ancient lakes has emerged as an important and exciting topic in evolutionary biology. The contributions in this volume deal with patterns and processes of biological diversification in three prominent ancient lake systems. Of these, the famous East African Great Lakes already have a strong tradition of evolutionary studies, but the two other systems have so far received much less attention. The exceptional biodiversity of the European sister lakes Ohrid and Prespa of the Balkans has long been known, but has largely been neglected in the international literature until recently. The rich biota and problems of its evolution in the two central lake systems on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, in turn, have only lately started to draw scientific attention. This volume aims at deepening the awareness of the unusual biological diversity in ancient lakes in general, and of the role of these lakes as natural laboratories for the study of speciation and diversification in particular. It should stimulate further research that will lead to a better understanding of key evolutionary processes in these lakes, and to knowledge that might help in mitigating the deterioration of their diversity in the future.
This volume surveys advances in the study of adaptive radiation showing how molecular characters can be used to analyze the origin and pattern of diversification within a lineage in a non-circular fashion.
It is my hope that this collection of reviews can be profitably read by all who are interested in evolutionary biology. However, I would like to specifically target it for two disparate groups of biologists seldom men tioned in the same sentence, classical ichthyologists and molecular biologists. Since classical times, and perhaps even before, ichthyologists have stood in awe at the tremendous diversity of fishes. The bulk of effort in the field has always been directed toward understanding this diversity, i. e. , extracting from it a coherent picture of evolutionary processes and lineages. This effort has, in turn, always been overwhelmingly based upon morphological comparisons. The practical advantages of such compari sons, especially the ease with which morphological data can be had from preserved museum specimens, are manifold. But considered objectively (outside its context of "tradition"), morphological analysis alone is a poor tool for probing evolutionary processes or elucidating relationships. The concepts of "relationship" and of "evolution" are inherently genetic ones, and the genetic bases of morphological traits are seldom known in detail and frequently unknown entirely. Earlier in this century, several workers, notably Gordon, Kosswig, Schmidt, and, in his salad years, Carl Hubbs, pioneered the application of genetic techniques and modes of reasoning to ichthyology. While certain that most contemporary ichth yologists are familiar with this body of work, I am almost equally certain that few of them regard it as pertinent to their own efforts.
Evolutionary ecology includes aspects of community structure, trophic interactions, life-history tactics, and reproductive modes, analyzed from an evolutionary perspective. Freshwater environments often impose spatial structure on populations, e.g. within large lakes or among habitat patches, facilitating genetic and phenotypic divergence. Traditionally, freshwater systems have featured prominently in ecological research and population biology. This book brings together information on diverse freshwater taxa, with a mix of critical review, synthesis, and case studies. Using examples from bryozoans, rotifers, cladocerans, molluscs, teleosts and others, the authors cover current conceptual issues of evolutionary ecology in considerable depth. The book can serve as a source of critically evaluated ideas, detailed case studies, and open problems in the field of evolutionary ecology. It is recommended for students and researchers in ecology, limnology, population biology, and evolutionary biology.
Nearly a decade ago I began planning this book with the goal of summarizing the existing body of knowledge on ecology of freshwater fishes in a way similar to that of H. B. N. Hynes' comprehensive treatise Ecology of Running Waters for streams. The time seemed appropriate, as there had been several recent volumes that synthesized much information on a range of topics important in fish ecology, from biogeographic to local scales. For example, the "Fish Atlas" (Lee et aI. , 1980) had provided range maps and basic entry to the original literature for all freshwater fishes in North America, and in 1986 Hocutt and Wiley's Zoogeography of North American Fishes provided a detailed synthesis of virtually everything known about distributional ecology of fishes on that continent. Tim Berra (1981) had summarized in convenient map form the worldwide distribution of all freshwater fish families, and Joe Nelson's 1976 and 1984 editions of Fishes of the World had appeared. To complement these "big picture" views of fish distributions, the volume on Community and Evolutionary Ecology of North American Freshwater Fishes, edited by David Heins and myself (Matthews and Heins, 1987), had provided an opportunity for more than 30 individuals or groups to summarize their work on stream fishes (albeit mostly for warmwater systems).