Conceptual Breakthroughs in Comparative Animal Physiology

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-12-817366-4
Verlag: Elsevier Science

Buch, Englisch, 276 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 450 g

Conceptual Breakthroughs in Comparative Animal Physiology tells a story of innate human curiosity about the natural world, and a deeply creative discipline, shaped by varied environments, unusual organisms, elegant experiments, and the persistent effort to understand how animals work and why they work the way they do—along the way discovering “adaptations and mechanisms of the most surprising character”.

Written by two leading experts in the field, each chapter reflects on the origins of ideas and the approach of turning natural diversity into experimental design. From deserts to oceans, from the anoxia-tolerant animals to endothermic insects, from deep-diving mammals to the integration of “omics,” each chapter follows the discoveries and people who were compelled to modify their view of “what life can do.” The chapters also highlight the long-term influence of key conceptual breakthroughs, demonstrating how insights from comparative physiology have shaped not only the field itself but also, ecology, evolution, and engineering.

As scientists strive to understand the complexity of living systems, the book underscores the inherent integrative nature of comparative physiology, revealing a process that strives to connect genes to organisms and organisms to environments, and providing a framework for understanding the diversity of life. This is an essential resource for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers interested in physiology with its comprehensive synopsis on the field’s foundational history and significant advances.

Zielgruppe

Advanced graduate and undergraduate students, researchers, and specialists in evolutionary biology and evolutionary studies

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hicks, James

Wang, Tobias

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Agrarwissenschaften Tierhaltung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. 1878: Claude Bernard and “la fixité du milieu intérieur”
2. 1910 -1961: From Reflexes to Rhythms: The Discovery of Central Pattern Generators
3. 1914 -1948: The Concept of Critical Oxygen Tension (PcritO2) and the limits of aerobic metabolism
4. 1929: Homeostasis and the “Wisdom of the Body”
5. 1929: The Progress of Physiology: August Krogh at the 1929 Congress
6. 1930 – 1935 Physiology of the Estivating Lungfish: Ecological and Evolutionary Insights
7. 1930- 1938: The Foundations of Osmoregulation in Aquatic Vertebrates: Early Discoveries in Teleost Fish and Elasmobranchs
8. 1931 – 1963: The History of Oxygen Secretion in the Fish Swim Bladder
9. 1932: From Mouse to Elephant: How Kleiber Transformed Our Understanding of Metabolism
10. 1933: James Gray and the Foundations of Animal Movement
11. 1935-1949: Krogh and Ussing: The Early Use of Isotopes in Biology
12. 1936-1961: Cryoprotectants in Comparative Physiology: Convergent Strategies for Life Below Zero
13. 1939-1942: The Master Switch of Life
14. 1940-1963: Pioneers of Desert Physiology: The Early Comparative Studies of Water Economy in Mammals
15. 1941: Myogenic Endothermy in Insects: The mechanism of flight preparation
16. 1944 The Desert Laboratory: Discovering Reptile Thermoregulation in the Coachella Valley
17. 1944 - 1950: Breathing in Bursts: Discontinuous gas exchange in insects
18. 1947: The Fry Paradigm: A Framework for Animal Activity
19. 1948: Hibernation: connection between metabolism and body temperature
20. 1949: Beyond One Spike, One Twitch: The Discovery of Asynchronous Muscle
21. 1950: Coulson and Hernandez and the Alkaline Tide: Acid–Base Physiology in Postprandial Vertebrates
22. 1950: Thermal Adaptations in Arctic and Tropical Mammals and Birds
23. 1954: Oxygen Without Red Blood Cells, Life Without Freezing: The Polar Fish Experiment
24. 1955-1957: Irving, Scholander and the Arctic Lesson: How Vessels Conserve Heat
25. 1955-1975: The doubly labeled water technique: measuring field energetics
26. 1958: Beyond the Kidney: The Salt Glands of Marine Birds and Reptiles
27. 1963: Homeostasis in the Field: The Water Economy of Birds
28. 1963: Ignition Point: How Arousal from Hibernation Unveiled a Thermogenic Organ
29. 1963-1993: The Big Four in Comparative Locomotion, Inverted pendulums, running springs, elastic energy storage and dynamic similarity
30. 1966-67: The Role of the Hypothalamus in Thermoregulation: Contributions from Comparative Physiology
31. 1966: Low PaCO2: The Signature Physiology of Water Breathers
32. 1966: How Regional and Facultative Endothermy Transformed the Study of Ectothermic Physiology
33. 1966: Cardiac Shunts: Mechanisms and Functional Significance
34. 1966-1972: Cooling the Brain: Countercurrent Exchange and the Carotid Rete
35. 1966: From Whalers’ Lines to Time–Depth Recorders: Tracing the Limits of Marine Mammal Diving
36. 1968-1972: Anaerobic Scope and Anaerobic Capacity in Ectotherms
37. 1968- 1974: The Mystery of Exercise Hyperpnea and the Role of Intrapulmonary Chemoreceptors
38. 1966-1968: Life Without Oxygen: Metabolic Depression and the Anoxic Turtle
39. 1970-1975: Comparative Respiratory Physiology and the Göttingen Models
40. 1972: Fish Gills Under Competing Demands: Oxygen Uptake vs. Ionic Balance
41. 1970-1972: The Cost of Transport: A Unifying Measure for Animal Locomotion
42. 1972: The Buffalo Curve and The Alpha-stat Hypothesis
43. 1971-72: Avian Gas Exchange: Countercurrent vs. Crosscurrent Mechanisms in Bird Lungs
44. 1973: Torkel Weis-Fogh: Discovering the Clap-and-Fling Mechanism
45. 1973-2002: Biochemical Adaptation: A Serendipitous Collaboration that Shaped a Discipline
46. 1974-1985: Keeping Membranes Fluid: The Discovery of Homeoviscous Adaptations to Temperature and Pressure
47. 1975: Behavioral Fever and Survival- the Logic of Fever
48. 1977-1983: The Worms that Changed our View of Life: Chemoautotrophy at Hydrothermal Vents
49. 1979: Maximum Metabolic Rate and the Making of Endotherms: The Aerobic C

Über Autor(innen)

Hicks, James
Dr. James Hicks is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Irvine. As a broadly trained integrative physiologist, Jim is internationally recognized for his research on the comparative and evolutionary physiology of the vertebrate cardiopulmonary system. He has authored more than 120 scientific articles on subjects ranging from the evolution of the vertebrate heart to physiological responses to microgravity and sports-related concussion. His research has been widely featured in the news media. In addition to his academic work, Jim has served as a consultant to the television and film industries, most notably as the life-science consultant to Disney/Pixar on the Academy Award–winning film WALL-E. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physiological Society, and the California Academy of Sciences. In 2012, he received the American Physiological Society’s August Krogh Distinguished Lectureship and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University, Denmark.

Wang, Tobias
Dr. Tobias Wang is a professor of Zoophysiology at Aarhus University, and Editor-in-Chief of Acta Physiologica. Tobias has studied respiratory adaptations in air-breathing fish, the high blood pressure in giraffes, digestion in snakes when they digest colossal meals, and has been fascinated by the physiological adaptation that enable animals to thrive in extreme environments, but also the use of exotic animals as models for human diseases. He has authored more than 300 scientific publications and more than 100 popular articles, and he often appears in the popular press.
Tobias is a member of the presidium of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and serves on the national committee that oversees animal experiments in Denmark. He has given the Krogh lectures in both the American Physiological Society and The International Union of Physiological Sciences, as well as the Bidder lecture in Society for Experimental Biology and the Burgh-Daly lecture in The Physiological society. He is on editorial boards of many journals in comparative physiology and has collaborators on most continents.