A01=R. McNeill Alexander
Acceleration
Action potential
Aircraft
Airfoil
Angle of attack
Animal locomotion
Aphid
Archimedes' principle
Arthropod
Author_R. McNeill Alexander
Bearing (mechanical)
Bernoulli's principle
Bird anatomy
Boundary layer
Buoy
Buoyancy
Buoyancy aid
Calculation
Category=PSV
Center of mass (relativistic)
Centrifugal force
Circulatory system
Cost of transport
Crawling (human)
Diagram
Drag coefficient
Elastic recoil
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Froude number
Gait
Gait (human)
Gravitational acceleration
Ground effect (aerodynamics)
Hooke's law
Hydrofoil
Insect
Jumping
Kinetic energy
Lift coefficient
Mammal
Measurement
Metabolism
Moment of inertia
Movement of Animals
Muscle
Myocyte
Natural selection
Osmotic pressure
Rectilinear locomotion
Requirement
Resonance
Reynolds number
Rodent
Rolling resistance
Running
Scallop
Shape factor (image analysis and microscopy)
Sphincter
Strain gauge
Surface area
Surface tension
Swim bladder
Teleost
Torque
Van der Waals force
Vertebrate
Vibration
Viscosity
Vortex ring
Wind tunnel
Wing loading
Wing tip
Work output
Product details
- ISBN 9780691126340
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 19 Mar 2006
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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How can geckoes walk on the ceiling and basilisk lizards run over water? What are the aerodynamic effects that enable small insects to fly? What are the relative merits of squids' jet-propelled swimming and fishes' tail-powered swimming? Why do horses change gait as they increase speed? What determines our own vertical leap? Recent technical advances have greatly increased researchers' ability to answer these questions with certainty and in detail. This text provides an up-to-date overview of how animals run, walk, jump, crawl, swim, soar, hover, and fly. Excluding only the tiny creatures that use cilia, it covers all animals that power their movements with muscle--from roundworms to whales, clams to elephants, and gnats to albatrosses. The introduction sets out the general rules governing all modes of animal locomotion and considers the performance criteria--such as speed, endurance, and economy--that have shaped their selection. It introduces energetics and optimality as basic principles. The text then tackles each of the major modes by which animals move on land, in water, and through air.
It explains the mechanisms involved and the physical and biological forces shaping those mechanisms, paying particular attention to energy costs. Focusing on general principles but extensively discussing a wide variety of individual cases, this is a superb synthesis of current knowledge about animal locomotion. It will be enormously useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and a range of professional biologists, physicists, and engineers.
R. McNeill Alexander is Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including "Optima for Animals" (Princeton), as well as the award-winning CD-ROM "How Animals Move".
