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Butterflies, among key animals for assessing environmental changes, have consequently also become prominent model organisms for the study of trade-offs in life history and behavioral traits. Examples include factors affecting the size of egg batches, fast or slow larval growth, waiting or searching for mates, migrating or staying put in the habitat, roosting alone or together in aggregations, and the development of different defense mechanisms. The book focuses on the factors and trade-offs leading to the development and evolution of distinct traits emerging in the life cycle of butterflies within their habitats. The reader is taken systematically through research findings in each life history stage, on the links identified between different aspects of butterfly biology that have been discovered, and introduced to novel ideas emerging from taking an integrative view of butterfly life history and behavior.
The first section deals with the study of relationships in biological systems. The second is an introduction to key aspects of butterfly biology, such as broad issues in taxonomy, the fossil record, variation in space-time, habitat and niche, and the butterfly body frame. The last two longer sections deal directly with the key puzzles in life history and behavior. The book is supported by an extensive glossary and bibliography and, to encourage incentives for ideas, it is liberally illustrated with diagrams for exploring in greater depth the relationships in butterfly biology.
About the author
Roger L. H. Dennis has spent 50 years researching butterfly ecology, biogeography and conservation during which he has produced over 220 publications. His previous book on a "Resource-based View for Conservation" received the British Ecological Society's Book of the Year in 2012. A Fellow of the Linnean Society and the Royal Entomological Society, he is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the NERC's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, and an Honorary Professor at Staffordshire University and at Oxford Brookes University.
Summary
Written by one of the world's leading and most respected experts on butterfly ecology, behaviour and conservation, this book summarises in one place for the first time our knowledge of butterfly life history strategies, behaviour and systems. This book represents a major contribution to the field of butterfly biology and entomology in general.
