Animal Architecture (Oxford Animal Biology)

334 Pages·2005·12.2 MB·English

by  Mike Hansell

Animal Architecture
Oxford Animal Biology Series
Editors
Professor Pat Willmeris in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews.
Dr David Norman is Director of the Sedgwick Museum at the University of
Cambridge.
Titles
Animal Eyes
M. F. Land, D-E. Nilsson
Animal Locomotion
Andrew A. Biewener
Animal Architecture
Mike Hansell
Advisers
Mark Elgar (Melbourne) Gideon Louw (Calgary)
Charles Ellington (Cambridge) R. McNeill Alexander (Leeds)
William Foster (Cambridge) Peter Olive (Newcastle)
Craig Franklin (Queensland) Paul Schmid-Hampel (Zurich)
Peter Holland (Reading) Steve Stearns (Yale)
Joel Kingsolver (North Carolina) Catherine Toft (Davis)
The role of the advisers is to provide an international panel to help suggest
titles and authors, to ensure individual countries' teaching needs are met, and
to act as referees.
The Oxford Animal Biology Series publishes attractive supplementary text-
books in comparative animal biology for students and professional researchers
in the biologiacal sciences, adopting a lively, integrated approach. The series
has two distinguishing features: first, book topics address common themes that
transcend taxonomy, and are illustrated with examples from throughout the
animal kingdom; secondly, chapter contents are chosen to match existing and
proposed courses and syllabuses, carefully taking into account the depth of
coverage required. Further reading sections, consisting mainly of review articles
and books, guide the reader into the more detailed research literature. The
Series is international in scope, both in terms of the species used as examples
and in the references to scientific work.
Animal Architecture
Mike Hansell
Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences,
University of Glasgow
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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ISBN 0–19–850751–8 (hbk.)
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To my colleagues, current and former.
Acknowledgements
I have always tried to relate the research I have conducted on any species of
builder to building biology as a whole. In this book I try to create a synthesis
of that biology. That is a rather daunting task, and one that I would have
found very difficult to undertake without the encouragement and wisdom of
others. I am fortunate enough to work in an environment where there is a
strong curiosity about the natural world and a readiness to share ideas.
In preparing this book I have been greatly helped by discussions with col-
leagues concerning general biological principles and matters of detail. This
has had important beneficial effects on the clarity of what I have said and in
the way I have said it. I am especially indebted to Graeme Ruxton for giving
me the benefit of his breadth of knowledge and understanding, and encour-
aging me simply by sharing my delight in the biology of animal builders.
There is hardly a part of this book that he has not read in draft and which has
not benefited from his constructive critical comment.
Several other colleagues have been kind enough to read parts of the book
in draft and offer helpful advice on improvement. In this respect, I am very
grateful to Stuart Humphries, Malcolm Kennedy, Sarah Brown, and Martin
Burns. Friends in other institutions have also been kind enough to read over
and comment upon draft text. They are Bob Jeanne, Holly Downing, and Bill
McGrew; I would like to thank them for their helpful suggestions and encour-
agement. For discussions on particular matters and for translations of pas-
sages of published research I am indebted to my colleagues Reudi Nager, Neil
Metcalfe, Geoff Hancock and Felicty Huntingford.
This book is reliant upon good support of the text by the figures. I could
not have had a better person working on the graphics and their presenta-
tion than Liz Denton. She has an eye for clear presentation and insists, with
firm diplomacy, line drawing, lettering, layout or other detail is presented
in the best possible way. This has greatly helped the presentation of my
ideas.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
The figures have been obtained from a variety of sources. Those from pub-
lished sources are acknowledged in the relevant figure captions, however, I
would like to personally thank some people for their assistance over certain
figures. Firstly I am most grateful to Margaret Mullen of the University of
Glasgow Electron Microscope Unit for her professionalism in the preparation
of the scanning electron micrographs in Fig. 2.4 and 5.6. I am grateful also to
the University of Glasgow Media Services (Photographic Unit) for a photo-
graph used in Fig. 5.6, and those in Fig. 5.8. I also wish to thank Bob Jeanne
for allowing me to reproduce the photograph of the nest of the wasp
Leipomelesin Fig. 1.5, Gary Taylor who kindly sent to me the lerp photographs
used in Fig. 2.5, and Guy Theraulaz who supplied me with the simulated
wasp nests of Fig. 4.10. I am most grateful to Karin Schuett for the spider silk
thread attachment micrographs in Fig. 5.7, to Samuel Zschokke for the micro-
graph of spider web radius in Fig. 5.9, and to Leticia Avilés for the photograph
of Tapinillusspiders shown in Fig. 8.8.
I also gratefully acknowledge permission to use from the following sources:
Fig. 2.6 from Mattson, S. and Cedhagen, T. (1989). Aspects of the behaviour
and ecology of Dyopedos monacanthus (Metzger) and D. porrectus Bate, with
comparative notes on Dulichia tuberculata Boeck (Crustacea: Amphipoda:
Podoceridae). Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 127, 253–272.
Copyright 1989 with permission of Elsevier.
Fig. 2.8 from Flood, P.R. (1991). Architecture of, and water circulation and
flow rate in the house of the planktonic tunicate Oikopleura labradoriensis.
Marine Biology, 111, 95–111. With permission of Springer-Verlag GmbH.
Fig 3.5 from Fitzgerald, T.D. and Clark, K.L. (1994). Analysis of leaf rolling
behaviour of Caloptilia serotinella. Journal of Insect Behaviour, 7, 859–872 by per-
mission of Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Fig. 3.10 from Evans, H.E. and West Eberhard, M.J. (1970). The wasps. The
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor ©. Fig. 5.2 (a) and (b) from Wiggins
(1977) by kind permission of the Royal Ontario Museum ©.
Fig. 4.11 from Hoftmann, A.A. (1994). Behaviour genetics and evolution. In
Behaviour and Evolution (eds. P.J.B. Slater and T.R. Halliday) pp. 7–42 by per-
mission of Cambridge University Press.
Fig. 5.5 from Jeanne, R.L. (1975). Adaptiveness of social wasp nest archi-
tectue. Quarterly Review of Biology, 50, 267–287. With permission of The
University of Chicago Press.
Fig. 7.8 from Büttner, H. (1996). Rubble mounds of the sand tilefish
Malacanthus plumieri(Bloch, 1787) and associated fishes in Colombia. Bulletin
of Marine Sciences, 58, 248–260 by permission of Bulletin of Marine Science.
Fig. 8.1 and 8.2 from - Stuart, A.E. and Hunter, F.F. (1998). End products of
behaviour versus behavioural characters: a phylogenetic investigation of
pupal cocoon construction and form in some North American blackflies
(Diptera: Simuliidae). Systematic Entomology, 23, 387–398 ©.
Preface
My aim in this book is to investigate and celebrate the biology of animal archi-
tecture. I believe that by writing this comprehensive overview, it can be seen
that this is a coherent biological topic which gives us important insights. I last
did this 20 years ago (Hansell 1984), so it is interesting for me not only to see
how much the subject has developed during that time, but also how my views
have changed too.
Animal builders are patchily distributed through the animal kingdom, but
research effort is also unevenly distributed within that. Spiders in particular
have received a lot of research attention, from the level of their building mater-
ial to the functional design of webs and their foraging ecology. Bird nests still
remain rather under-researched, but there is a flurry of exciting research on
bowerbird displays. The book reveals a need for more information in a num-
ber of areas, for example, on the composition and properties of self-secreted
building materials other than silk, and the mechanical properties of nearly all
structures other than spider webs. On the other hand we now have a much
better understanding of how simple organisms can build large complex struct-
ures, and there have been developments in the ecological and evolutionary
concepts of niche construction and ecological inheritance to which studies of
animal builders have contributed.
This book recognises three broad categories of structure: homes, traps and
displays. Chapter 1 looks at the functional role of these: homes to protect
builders from the hostile forces of the physical and biological world, foraging
and feeding assisted by burrowing or by the use of nets or webs, and struct-
ures for intraspecific communication, in particular the displays of bower-
birds.
Chapter 2 tests predictions relating to building materials: that self-secreted
materials will tend to be more standardised and more complex than collected
materials and that, because of this, they will tend to be more characteristic of
dynamic structures like traps than of static ones, exemplified by houses. In
ix
x Preface
fact, collected materials prove to be quite highly standardised, while the syn-
thesis of self-secreted materials does show some flexibility.
The process of building is examined in Chapters 3 and 4. Building anatomy
is shown to be generally unspecialised for delicate manipulative skills but
modified for power in many burrowing species. Building behaviour is found
to be simple and repetitive. These findings support predictions I have previ-
ously made (Hansell 1984, 2000). The creation of very large and complex
structures is shown to be possible largely through a dialogue between the
builder and the developing structure in which building actions in response to
local stimuli change the stimulus situation; complex architecture is an emerg-
ent property of self-organising processes. These principles apply equally well
to building by large workforces of social insects as to single individuals.
Animal tools are considered in the light of these findings, because they are
generally regarded as important in the context of human evolution, in spite of
being small and often of simple construction. Some tool makers are found to
show evidence of advanced learning and cognition, but assessment of these
attributes in builders generally suffers from lack of evidence.
Mechanics, growth, and design are the subjects of Chapter 5. Animal homes
show how building rules can be conserved while the structures grow with the
size of the individual or colony occupying them. Spiders' webs provide mod-
els for the study of engineering in tension, while display structures, in particu-
lar those of bowerbirds, provide possible models for the investigation of the
evolution of an aesthetic sense. In Chapter 6, the cost of home building and
its trade-offs with other life history traits is examined using examples of birds'
nests and caddis cases; on trap building costs and their consequences, spider
webs again supply the majority of the evidence.
Buildings change the world both for builders and organisms that associate
with them. These are the themes of Chapters 7 and 8. Predictions (Hansell
1987a, 1993) that builders, as ecosystem engineers, will tend to stabilise hab-
itats, resist extinction, and promote biodiversity are examined. The last of these
is clearly supported, although this is found to be largely through facultative
associations by organisms with constructed habitat niches. The limitations of
animal built structures as evidence of phylogeny is discussed, and the concept
of a key adaptation examined with the conclusion that arthropod silk has the
strongest claim to this title. Evidence that building has contributed to social
evolution (Hansell 1987a) is found to be inconsistent. Finally, builders are seen
to alter the course of their own evolution through ecological inheritance, the
passing on to their descendents of habitats that they have altered.