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Mammal Societies

ISBN: 978-1-119-09536-1

April 2016

Wiley-Blackwell

760 pages

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Description

The book aims to integrate our understanding of mammalian societies into a novel synthesis that is relevant to behavioural ecologists, ecologists, and anthropologists. It adopts a coherent structure that deals initially with the characteristics and strategies of females, before covering those of males, cooperative societies and hominid societies. It reviews our current understanding both of the structure of societies and of the strategies of individuals; it combines coverage of relevant areas of theory with coverage of interspecific comparisons, intraspecific comparisons and experiments; it explores both evolutionary causes of different traits and their ecological consequences; and it integrates research on different groups of mammals with research on primates and humans and attempts to put research on human societies into a broader perspective.

About the Author
Professor Tim Clutton-Brock is one of the world's leading zoologists. As of 2008, he was the Prince Philip Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and head of the Large Animal Research Group at the Department of Zoology of the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He also holds extraordinary professorships in the Department of Zoology and Entomology and the Mammal Research Institute of the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987. He is an ISI Highly Cited researcher. He won the 1997 Frink Medal of the Zoological Society of London. In 2012, he was awarded the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society for his work on the diversity of animal societies and demonstration of their effects on the evolution of reproductive strategies, and the operation of selection and the dynamics of populations.
Professor Clutton-Brock's early work was on social behaviour in primates. Much of his recent work focuses on three long-term studies: of red deer on the Scottish island of Rùm, of Soay sheep on St Kilda, and of meerkats in the southern Kalahari. He is one of the founders of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, the subjects of which are featured in the television programme Meerkat Manor, and the BBC's Natural World series.