Behavior & Its Neural Control in Gastropod Molluscs

During the past quarter century, there has been a tremendous expansion in our knowledge about gastropods, their behavior and their neurobiology. We can understand a great deal about mammalian nervous systems by studying the relatively larger and simpler structure of the gastropod nervous system. Behavior and Its Neural Control in Gastropod Molluscs first reviews the broader aspects of molluscan biology and draws attention to the special features of the gastropod nervous system. The book then examines different types of behavior, reviewing progress in understanding the mechanisms of neural control, and emphasizing cases in which control can be attributed to identified neurons and identified neural circuits.

About the Author :
Ronald Chase is Professor Emeritus at McGill University in Montreal. He received a B.A. degree from Stanford University, dropped out of Harvard Law School, and later earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After postdoctoral research in Munich and Seattle, he moved to Montreal in 1971, where he taught neurobiology in the Department of Biology at McGill University. During his research career of 38 years, he published over 80 peer-reviewed articles on snail brains and snail sex. In addition to Behavior and its Neural Control in Gastropod Molluscs, Dr. Chase has written two books about mental illness, The Physical Basis of Mental Illness and Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science.

Review :
"Surprisingly, there has been no comprehensive review of gastorpod neurbiology since 1986, so this book fills a serious gap and makes accessible a scattered literature from around the world...[The author's] interests focus on the significance of identifiable neurons and neural circuits and the plasticity of their synapses as it relates to learning and memory...his review of the cellular discoveries arising from four decades of gastropod neuroethology should be required reading for any beginning molecular biologists with an interest in neurons." --Bulletin, Canadian Society of Zoologists "...the book is interesting to read, shows remarkable scholarship, and is certainly a 'must-have' for a wide array of biologists with even a passing interest in mollusks, whether they be zoologists, behavioral ecologists, or neurobiologists." Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology "Ronald Chase's book is a welcome review of the breathtaking progress of the past 3 or so decades to unravel behavioral and neural mechanisms in gastropods...a splendid summary, and should be required reading for graduate students in zoology and neuroethology who are looking for questions on the overlapping edges of neuroscience, behavior and their cellular and molecular underpinnings." Integrative and Comparative Biology "The book provides an authoritative account of the wide behavioral repertoire and its neural control in a group of animals that have been attractive to neurobiologists because of the relative ease of identifying neurons and investigating neural circuitry in the CNS. The book is carefully researched and has a lively style. ...The bibliography is a carefully selected list of the most important papers/reviews and will allow access to the more detailed literature." Newsletter, International Society for Neuroethology "The book is divided into two parts. In the first four chapters the main aspects of the animals are introduced...For those who are not so familiar with gastropods, these chapters provide an excellent introduction for what follows. In the next five chapters the main behavioural activities are dealt with one by one: regulation of the internal environment, locomotion, feeding, reproduction, and defence. In each of these chapters, the author gradually works his way from the behaviour towards the underlying neural mechanisms. Finally, and fittingly, in the last chapter the author tackles how all the activities are distributed over time... The book is conveniently equipped with taxonomic, neuron and subject indexes and special care has been taken to cite the most important literature. " Animal Behaviour "This is two valuable books in one volume: the behaviour of a large range of gastropods, and the neural basis of gastropod behaviour. . . . Neurologists will obviously benefit from reading this book, but so too will behavioural ecologists and ethologists. . . . The author picks modern examples, so that this book is an excellent review. However, there is also sufficient background to make the work accessible to undergraduate students. Here is a clearly written, well researched compendium of modern research which should be in every university library and on the bookshelves of all invertebrate neurologists and behaviourists." -- Bulletin of the Malacological Society of London "[T]he book is ... a readable and useful introduction for the novice and contains much that was new and intriguing to one that has been trying to keep up with this literature for many years. ... It will be an important resource for model system neurobiologists for a long time to come and will also be valuable to those malacologists who would like an easy overview of [how] the gastropod model systems work."--The Veliger