Engineering Animals

by Denny, Mark; Mcfadzean, Alan

• ISBN13: 9780674048546
• ISBN10: 0674048547
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-16
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

The alarm calls of birds make them difficult for predators to locate, while the howl of wolves and the croak of bullfrogs are designed to carry across long distances. From an engineerrs"s perspective, how do such specialized adaptations among living things really work? And how does physics constrain evolution, channeling it in particular directions?Writing with wit and a richly informed sense of wonder, Denny and McFadzean offer an expert look at animals as works of engineering, each exquisitely adapted to a specific manner of survival, whether that means spinning webs or flying across continents or hunting in the dark-or writing books. This particular book, containing more than a hundred illustrations, conveys clearly, for engineers and nonengineers alike, the physical principles underlying animal structure and behavior.Pigeons, for instance-when understood as marvels of engineering-are flying remote sensors: they have wideband acoustical receivers, hi-res optics, magnetic sensing, and celestial navigation. Albatrosses expend little energy while traveling across vast southern oceans, by exploiting a technique known to glider pilots as dynamic soaring. Among insects, one species of fly can locate the source of a sound precisely, even though the fly itself is much smaller than the wavelength of the sound it hears. And that big-brained, upright Great Ape? Evolution has equipped us to figure out an important fact about the natural world: that there is more to life than engineering, but no life at all without it.

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. 1
Structure and Movement
Go with the Flow	p. 7
Structural Engineering: The Bare Bones	p. 35
A Moving Experience	p. 58
A Mind of Its Own	p. 81
Built for Life	p. 106
Simple Complexity: Emergent Behavior	p. 130
Remote Sensing
A Chemical Universe	p. 155
Sound Ideas	p. 178
Animal Sonar	p. 203
Seeing the Light	p. 236
There and Back Again: Animal Navigation	p. 263
Talk to the Animals	p. 289
Epilogue	p. 313
Notes	p. 317
Further Reading	p. 347
References	p. 351
Acknowledgments	p. 371
Index	p. 373
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