Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Perspective on Behaviour

Graduate level book - so might want to keep that in mind. Some of the reading is a bit obtuse and repetitive but overall - I am enjoying it. I bought mine used and it came in great condition before it was scheduled to arrive.

Good book

This was required text for my graduate behavioral ecology course and I was not terribly impressed. I ended up referring to my Evolutionary Analysis book (Freeman and Herron) and the internet for the majority of the semester.

While this text is apparently the "go-to" book for most ecology courses, I have found that the authors are very selective in their references, using material from very few sources. I would like to see a broader scope of ideas. As others have mentioned, each chapter has a different writing style because the authors take turns, but overall the writing style is convoluted and difficult to make sense of. Finally, I think I made a tally sheet for the number of types a hypothesis or model was presented, only to be followed with "more research is needed in this area" or "this has yet to be tested."

A good attempt at encompassing this broad area of research. This is an area of research that has needed an updated text book. The book does suffer from several things. First the chapters are written by a variety of authors and in this case this method has produced a book with a wide array of writing styles that makes it difficult to go from one chapter to the next. Second the book is very selective in its citations. Particular authors are cited often even under circumstances where more in depth work or even more classic work has been done by others.

One of the best behavioural ecology text books out there! Very informative, though certain aspects of the text can be somewhat convoluted. Another excellent read is by Dugatkin (2013) and makes for a good complimentary text for the more challenging concepts.