ch. 1. Basic concepts : budgets, allometry, temperature, and the imprint of history --
1.1. The input/output budget : a key conceptual framework --
1.2. The importance of size : scaling of physiological and ecological traits --
1.3. The importance of temperature --
1.4. Using historical data in comparative studies --
Section 2 : Chemical ecology of food --
ch. 2. The chemistry and biology of food --
2.1. Getting started ; first catch (store and prepare) the hare --
2.2 Proximate nutrient analysis --
2.5. Amino acids and proteins --
2.9. Secondary metabolites --
2.10. Words of encouragement --
Section 3 : Digestive ecology --
ch. 3. Food intake and utilization efficiency --
3.1. Overview of section 3 : Why study digestion? --
3.2. Digestive efficiency is inversely related to "fiber" content --
3.3. Both digestion rate and digestive efficiency are key nutritional variables --
3.4. Daily food intake : energy maximization or regulation? --
ch. 4. Simple guts : the ecological biochemistry and physiology of catalytic digestion --
4.1. Lots of guts, but only a few basic types --
4.2. The gut as a bottleneck to energy flow --
4.3. The gut in energy intake maximizers --
4.4. Intermittent feeders --
4.5. The gut in diet switchers --
4.6. The evolutionary match between digestion, diets, and animal energetics --
4.7. Summary : the interplay between digestive physiology and ecology --
ch. 5. Photosynthetic animals and gas-powered mussels : the physiological ecology of nutritional symbioses --
5.1. A symbiotic world --
5.2. A diversity of nutritional symbioses --
5.3. Hot vents and cold seeps : chemolithotrophs of the deep sea --
5.4. The importance of nitrogen in nutritional symbioses --
ch. 6. Digestive symbioses : how insect and vertebrate herbivores cope with low quality plant foods --
6.1. Fermentation of cell wall materials --
6.2. Microbial fermentation in insect guts --
6.3. Terrestrial vertebrates --
6.4. Herbivory and detritivory in fish --
Section 4 : The ecology of postabsorptive nutrient processing --
ch. 7. Postabsorptive processing of nutrients --
7.1. Overview : The postabsorptive fate of absorbed materials --
7.2. Controls over postabsorptive processing --
7.3. Costs of digestive and postabsorptive processing --
7.4. Feast and famine : the biochemistry of natural fasting and starvation --
7.5. Biochemical indices of nutritional status and habitat quality --
ch. 8. Isotopic ecology --
8.3. Isotopic signatures --
8.4. The dynamics of isotopic incorporation --
8.5. Stable isotopes and migration --
8.6. Nitrogen isotopes --
8.7. Concluding remarks and (yet again) a call for laboratory experiments --
ch. 9. How animals deal with poisons and pollutants --
9.1. Overview : the postabsorptive fate of absorbed xenobiotics --
9.2. Distribution of xenobiotics in the body --
9.3. Biotransformation of absorbed xenobiotics --
9.4. Elimination of xenobiotics and their metabolites --
9.5. Costs of xenobiotic biotransformation and elimination --
9.6. Modeling approaches can integrate the processes of absorption, distribution, and elimination (including biotransformation and excretion) --
9.7. Models can predict bioaccumulation and biomagnification in ecosystems --
9.8. Postingestional effects of xenobiotics on feeding behavior --
9.9. Toxic effects of xenobiotics in wild animals --
9.10. Toxicogenomics : new methodologies for the integrative study of exposure, postabsorptive processing, and toxicity in animals exposed to natural and manmade toxins --
Section 5 : Limiting nutrients --
ch. 10. Ecological stoichiometry --
10.1. Ecological stoichiometry : the power of elemental analysis --
10.2. An ecological stoichiometry primer --
10.3. Are energy and elements two independent currencies? --
ch. 11. Nitrogen and mineral requirements --
11.1. Nitrogen requirements and limitation in ecology--
11.2. Mineral requirements and limitation in ecology --
ch. 12. Water requirements and water flux --
12.1. Water budgets, fluxes, and requirements --
12.2. Avenues of water loss --
12.3. The dietary requirement for water --
12.4. Ingestion of xenobiotics can increase the dietary requirement for water --
12.5. Is water ecologically limiting? --
12.6. Testing the evolutionary match between environmental aridity and water relations --
Section 6 : Production in budgets of mass and energy --
ch. 13. Growth budgets of mass and energy --
13.1. Overview of chapters 13 and 14 --
13.2. Two approaches are used to evaluate costs of production --
13.3. Energetics of growth--
13.5. Growth in relation to life history transitions --
ch. 14. Reproduction in budgets of mass and energy --
1.41. Allocation to reproduction : trade-off with development and effects of body size --
14.2. Approaches for measuring costs of reproduction --
14.3. Material costs of reproduction --
14.4. Nutritional control of reproduction --
14.5. Putting energy and material costs of reproduction in perspective --