Dragonflies and Damselflies: Model Organisms for Ecological and Evolutionary Research

Alex Córdoba-Aguilar

Aug 2008 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

Dragonflies and Damselflies documents the latest advances in odonate biology and relates these to a broader ecological and evolutionary research agenda. Despite being one of the smallest insect orders, dragonflies offer a number of advantages for both laboratory and field studies. In fact, they have been crucial to the advancement of our understanding of insect ecology and evolution. This book provides a critical summary of the major advances in these fields. Contributions from many of the leading researchers in dragonfly biology offer new perspectives and paradigms as well as additional, unpublished, data. The editor has carefully assembled a mix of theoretical and applied chapters (including those addressing conservation and monitoring) and achieves a balance of emerging and established research topics, providing suggestions for future study in each case. This accessible text is not about dragonflies per se but an essential source of knowledge that describes how different sets of evolutionary and ecological principles/ideas have been tested on a particular taxon. It will therefore be suitable for graduate students and researchers in entomology, evolutionary biology, population and behavioural ecology, and conservation biology. It will of course be of particular interest and use to those working on insects and an indispensable reference text for odonate biologists.

Ratings and reviews

I purchased this book as it showed up on Amazon UK when I happened to be expanding my library of books on dragonflies and I'm glad I did. The papers presented are of uniformly high quality and, for the most part, very accessible to the layman. I found some of the papers on evolution using molecular biology were a bit beyond my level, but even they had a great deal of interesting information. The ecology papers gave quite a few ideas where the amateur odonatologist could contribute to the understanding of damselflies and dragonflies and their place in ecology. The only minor flaw was that for some reason a few papers used vernacular names in their tables rather than scientific names. This reduces the value slightly as vernacular names vary by region whereas scientific names do not.

About the author

Alex Córdoba-Aguilar received his PhD from Sheffield University (UK) in 1999 and since 2003 has been working as a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He and his students have studied the ecology and evolution of several insect species using mainly dragonflies as study subjects. Alex's major scientific interests are sexual selection, genital evolution and insect immunity.