The Badgers of Wytham Woods

"The Wytham badger study was begun in earnest by Hans Kruuk in 1972, with David Macdonald his graduate student, and in turn Chris Newman David's graduate student. Fifty years later they have documented the genealogy, births, deaths, and 'marriages' of over 1,900 individuals. These data are the meat of this book, which is an account launched by one population of badgers, but landing in the wider landscape of evolutionary biology. The book is a journey from the particular to the general, developing themes from a model species that grows from the authors' approach to The Badgers of Wytham Woods: a model for behaviour, ecology and evolution. This accessible monograph engages fifty years of primary research woven around the badgers of Wytham Woods (Oxford, UK), to advance fundamental knowledge of behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology, covering topics as diverse as life history strategy, climate change biology, genetics, communication, senescence, immunology, endocrinology and epidemiology. The book begins with aspects of individual behaviour, starting with the birth, early development, and then recruitment of youngsters into their social groups. In the quest to understand badger society and its adaptive significance, following chapters describe social networks, the social dynamics of badgers within those networks, their communication, to ultimately evaluate the pros and, importantly, cons of group living. Having created a complete profile of the behaviour of Wytham's badgers within their social groups, the account turns to the paradoxical relationships between adjoining social groups, introducing evidence for broader interactions at the population level, and then offers an ecological framework within which to interpret this sociology, explaining how group-living can evolve facultatively and benefit a species equally adapted to living much less gregariously under other ecological circumstances. Next the story turns to population levels of analysis, exploring, successively, demography, the impacts of density, life-history trade-offs (including Pace of Life theory) and notably extrinsic factors, such as the weather and adaptability to climate change. This population-level sequence of chapters leads to an account of diseases, immunology and, specifically, the role of badgers as a reservoir for bovine tuberculosis, before moving to yet a different level - molecular. This leads to genetic selection and genealogy, and thence senescence, adding a bookend to the opening account of birth. The concluding chapter sets The Badgers of Wytham Woods in the framework of variation at two levels, intra-specific and inter-specific, which culminates in an exploration of a theme woven throughout the book: how badger society is an emergent outcome of ecology and the environmental conditions they experience, framed by the phylogeny of the Mustelidae and, more broadly, by mammalian evolution"--