Play, Cooperation ↔ Competition and Foraging in Animal Ontogenies and Phylogenies - Comparative Multipolar Perspectives
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Ecology and Conservation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2024) | Viewed by 255
Special Issue Editor
Interests: My research interests in animal play span the entire phylogenetic spectrum of playful and potentially playful species. With special emphases on birds and nonhuman mammals, my interests also privilege the exciting and important original work published by other ethologists and comparative psychologists on play in cold-blooded vertebrates and in certain invertebrates
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This special issue is about the role of developing behavior, including play and playfulness, throughout deep time. Behavior can seed radically new ecological initiatives in a pluralistic evolutionary framework. Equally, behavior can preserve old initiatives that can be adapted for new purposes long after the associated supporting morphologies are gone. The context of the special issue is the interaction of ontogeny and ecology from the present moment throughout deep time. Habitat, the "templet for ecology" (Southwood), is respectfully and pluralistically reconceptualized, following R.S. Hopkins, as site (the visual and tangible) and space (the invisible and experiential), in French place et espace. The key guiding significance of habitat in ecology is underscored by its interaction with ontogeny -- how animals develop skills and behavioral flexibility to interact with their physical environment and to hack these interactions in a way that may (though not necessarily consciously or planfully) open new avenues of niche construction, creation and innovation. In reimagining food and habitat as activities rather than contested commodities and in stressing the active role that organisms play in ecology and evolution, the papers in this special issue embrace a vaster pluralism than has been. In a true multipolar world, hegemony is not abolished, it withers away.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Robert M. Fagen
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- ethology
- ontogeny
- active role
- habitat
- predation
- defense
- play
- sociality
- cooperation
- competition
- comparative method
- mutual aid
- extended developmental-evolutionary synthesis
- pluralistic
- multipolar
- Kortlandt
- Bergson
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