It is difficult for me to recollect a time when I was not fascinated with the very notion of a desert. Walt Disney's film, The Living Desert, which I initially saw when I was 8 years of age, provided me with my first glimpse of this wondrous yet seemingly ho stile environment. The images were hypnotic and captivating. I looked on in amazement at the promenade Cl deux of the male and female scorpions during courtship. Their rhythmic and coordinated movements as they grasped one another made them appear to glide in unis on over the surface of the sand, each individual totally absorbed with its partner. In the next minute the fern ale had suddenly and utterly transformed herself like some Jekyll and Hyde act, into an aggressive predator whose prior gregarious embrace was now a hold of death for the male. The indomitable desert grasshopper mouse, the ever sentient kit fox, the graceful shovel-nosed snake swimming in an endless sea of sand.

How various life history parameters are subject to natural selection and how they contribute to the fitness of arthropods who inhabit one of the most hostile and unpredictable environments on earth

Klappentext

This book is a basic account of the life cycles and life history strategies of the major groups of desert arthropods. It covers a wide variety of topics including an overview of major adaptations in desert arthropods, characteristic features of deserts, a comprehensive review of life history theory, and a detailed description of embryonic and postembryonic development. The book also provides an in-depth discussion of the life history traits in these animals including development time, growth rates and patterns, age and size at maturity, size and number of offspring, sex ratios, costs associated with reproduction and longevity, and explains how these traits are inextricably connected by various trade-offs including those between current reproduction and survival, current and future reproduction, and between number, size and sex of offspring. Finally, the relationship between behavioral ecology and life history traits is discussed.

Inhalt
1 Life Histories and the Desert Environment.- 2 Embryonic Development.- 3 Postembryonic Development.- 4 Reproduction.- 5 Life Histories: Individual Case Studies.- 6 Relationship Between Life History and Behavioral Ecology.- References.