Title
Engineering Animals : How Life Works / Alan McFadzean, Mark Denny.
ISBN
9780674060852
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2011]
Copyright
©2011
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (395 p.) : 100 line illus., 18 halftones
Other Standard Identifiers
10.4159/harvard.9780674060852 doi
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 engineer'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.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)
Frontmatter
Contents
Prologue
Part one: Structure and Movement
1 Go with the Flow
2 Structural Engineering: The Bare Bones
3 A Moving Experience
4 A Mind of Its Own
5 Built for Life
6 Simple Complexity: Emergent Behavior
Part two: Remote Sensing
7 A Chemical Universe
8 Sound Ideas
9 Animal Sonar
10 Seeing the Light
11 There and Back Again: Animal Navigation
12 Talk to the Animals
Epilogue
Notes
Further Reading
References
Acknowledgments
Index
