(Part 3) Best marine mammals biology books according to redditors

While I agree with some points you've made, I don't think the fact that humans hunt for food means that as a species they are inherently non-peaceful. In fact, the Killer Ape hypothesis has been challenged for a number of years, most recently by Travis Pickering, in part because the act of hunting offers numerous benefits and provides social stability.

Of course, I'm not insinuating that humans are peaceful. To really delve into that further, one would have to define the parameters of what it means to be peaceful.

In N. America, bison played the role as the major grazer/ecosystem engineer. Restoring the continent's grasslands by bringing back giant herds of bison remains a crazy idea to most unfortunately. Two books are pertinent to this issue: Bison: A Natural History and Grassland.

Wikipedia's article on moose references an offline book regarding "devil's antlers", Deer of the World: Their Evolution, Behaviour, and Ecology. The book was written by Valerius Geist, who is described as a "specialist on the biology, behavior, and social dynamics of large North American mammals (elk, moose, bighorn sheep and other wild ungulates)". I'm going to venture a guess that however rare "devil's antlers" are, Valerius Geist is a credible source for confirming their existence.

Post inspired by a chapter in The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World's Most Misunderstood Mammals by Merlin Tuttle

That's apparently fairly common behavior for octopodes -- and a pain for aquarium workers, as they are also apparently very good at manipulating latches and so forth the keep their enclosure doors closed.

For anecdotal stories of octopus (and other intelligent animals') shenanigans, I can recommend The Octopus and the Orangutan. It's certainly not "scientific" - written by a journalist rather than a biologist, and as I mentioned, it's a collection of anecdotes, many from zookeepers, people who work at sanctuaries, etc. But a very interesting read IMHO.

I love this concept! Have you by any chance read Mind in the Waters?

War Against the Wolf is a book full of stories like that. Picked it up when I was a kid at a wolf preserve in northern MN. Really amazing to hear the details of how large and widespread the wolf population was in North America 200-300 years ago.

Despite knowing all this, I readily hunt coyotes and fox, and would be interested in taking a shot at a wolf tag if they opened up a season in my state. As has been stated by previous posters, the ecosystem as we are accustomed to it requires population control by humans. We knocked it too far out of balance to leave it be at this point.


And here's the full Seton account of Lobo and Blanca:

http://www.pineapplefish56.net/Setons_Lobo.html

Not sure what you are looking for, but a book that I am reading now has drastically changed my perspective on a lot of things. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt.

If you are looking for offbeat fiction, I enjoyed Nop's Trials by Donald McCraig

Older, but I like just about everything by Uberto Eco including The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum

Lastly, I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude (Bloom's Guides (Hardcover)) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I know the author of the book "The Eastern Cougar" personally, I've read it. I live near where this attack happened. There was some fool who had three western mountain lions as "pets" in his backyard in the county. He got busted, but I have no doubt there are other idiots who buy them illegally and let them go when they realize what a terrible idea it was.

I'm definitely one of those "I want to believe" types. But if you read the history, the sad reality is the European settlers killed off most of the eastern cats, and their descendents killed off the rest. I do believe that there are a few mountain lions living in the Appalachians (as evidenced by this news story) but those are escaped pets.

I read the book spying on whales a few months ago. Nick Pyenson believes the limits to whale growth is related to energy lost in lunging. If you have enough krill you could breed bigger whales.

Great, found it. Thanks!

Frosty?

Chimps do it, you already mentioned cats, Coyotes do it, and of many other species we simply don’t know …

And if you claim that this is necessary to train their hunting skills, why shouldn’t we give them a gadget that does the job just as well and thereby prevent some mice from dying a cruel death?

Anything in the rodent family will give you a lot of material. I'd go with squirrels (Sciuridae). Depending on what you're looking to talk about, you could go into evolution of social behaviors like alarm calls and territoriality or stick to the basics and talk about the phylogenetic tree they're in or their morphological evolution.

I personally like Abert's squirrels a lot because they're cute because they've been studied in depth for a while. Here's a book on the history of Sciurus aberti for starters, but a quick journal search showed me that there's also a lot published about their genetics, habitat, bone morphology, etc. so you'd have a lot of reference points.

Edit: book link only for people at my university. replaced with an Amazon link but check your college's library and they'll probably have a free eBook of it.

Great read if you want to permanently give yourself the same feeling when in the woods that ‘Jaws’ gives you when swimming in the ocean...

Stalked by a Mountain Lion: Fear, Fact, And The Uncertain Future Of Cougars In America https://www.amazon.com/dp/0762743158/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_DVg1CbEWZNR93

Its typical behavior. There are tons of documented cases; ranging from natives in the area, tourists and scientists there specifically looking for it.

Other than Daphne's book which I cited earlier, you can read about these cases in these two books.

Seeing it once or twice wouldn't make it a phenomena, its just way too common to be anything but a pattern.

My anecdotal information comes from Vets and conservationists I've met and spent time with. I don't have any information on Asian elephants specifically, other than the fact that they also exhibit this behavior. So its not regional.

Edit: Broken link

That's a myth, man. If you look down these comments, I put a longer explanation of it down (all the swearing and such in it are because there was somebody being a total douche)

Edit: here it is, straight copy and paste. Ignore the swearing, it was to somebody else. Also, I had a raccoon that's a bit of a mascot at work licking peanut butter suet off my fingers, he definitely had saliva.

"You really are a bitter, miserable person belligerent at everybody for no fucking reason, aren't you? Has it ever occurred to you to make your points in a way that doesn't make you seem like an utter twat and maybe, just maybe, have a rational discussion?

I doubt you'll listen to this at all as it's just my word that I read in a text in a course and lectured on it by the professor of that course (Wildlife Management at Ohio State.) But I don't really care, maybe somebody else on the thread will find this interesting. I'm far from an expert, I can only say what I learned in college and on the job. And I will say, I thought this was a recent thing to be researched and watched but it's not at all so I guess I can thank your boorishness for that.

The idea that they have inadequate saliva glands was a hypothesis from a rather influential, if controversial, French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc in the 1770's. But starting about 1979 (from what I can tell) it seems a substantial portion of naturalists and wild life researchers that write and work on Wildlife (especially in the United States, Germany and Japan) were coming to see it another way. It comes down to their paws.

I read this one in college https://www.amazon.com/Peterson-Reference-Behavior-American-Mammals/dp/0618883452 which in the raccoon section talks extensively about how raccoon's paw pads are one of their most important sensory organs and how they use it to judge what they're about to eat. They do this pad handling and rubbing no matter what, as you can find plenty of videos and pictures of them doing it nowhere near water (want links? I found some from just crazy people hand feeding in their back yard, some wildlife trap cams and some articles and a video from Smithsonian sites and NatGeo.) Why they seem to do it most in the water, while yes they will use it as an opportunity to brush off excess rubbish (but will happily eat garbage anyways when nowhere near water) is that the flesh of their pads will become more sensitive and pliant in water, allowing them to feel what they're about to shove up their gob even more so and judge best they can if it's really something edible.

Seriously though, this is a super low hanging fruit. You accuse me of just skimming a single article but if you actually do any kind of search, whether just a quick google/wikipedia (which has a whole slew of credible references about this exact thing btw) looked on sites like the smithsonian, or find a book on it you'll see that a good number of people in wildlife communities consider this a mistaken hypothesis that became a myth. I found a 50 minute video of a lady continually feeding a pair dry kibble and they went to town on it like the fat trash pandas they are, no problems with saliva not letting them eat. So scientific consensus is in fact not at all what you said and that you're also a cunt.

Edit: Forgot to mention when saying it's not as recent as I thought. The first wildlife studies that I could find in old text book references and online is from 1979, a study piece titled "Procyon lotor" credited to Lotze, J.-H. and S. Anderson."

The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives

Biology doesn't work that way. Selection is not the single factor in evolution and selection doesn't operate at the level of the gene.

There's no "selfish gene", Neo-Darwinists like the asshole Dawkins are just arrogant pricks and not actual scientists.


I recommend you take a look at this paper: http://videnssamfundet.au.dk/fileadmin/www.videnssamfundet.au.dk/nyheder/kalender/afviklede_aktiviteter/ingold.pdf

And this: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun

I also would recommend at the work of biologists like:

The famous physiologist Denis Noble and his two books:

"Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity": https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Tune-Life-Biological-Relativity/dp/1107176247/

"The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes": https://www.amazon.com/Music-Life-Biology-Beyond-Genes/dp/0199228361/

James A. Shapiro's "Evolution: A View from the 21st Century": https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-View-21st-Century-paperback/dp/0133435539


What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes: https://www.amazon.com/What-Means-98%25-Chimpanzee-People/dp/0520226151/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8