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Animal Architecture (Oxford Animal Biology) PDF

334 Pages·2005·12.2 MB·English
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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 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi S~ao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ACatalogue record for this title is available from the British Library British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data (Data available) ISBN 0–19–850751–8 (hbk.) ISBN 0–19–850752–6 (pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles, King’s Lynn 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.

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