This textbook presents all basic principles of animal behaviour in a clear and concise manner and illustrates them with up-to-date examples. Emphasis is placed on behavioural biology as an integrative discipline of organismic biology, focusing on the adaptive value of behaviours that facilitate resource access, predator avoidance and reproductive success and underlie parental care, all within a comprehensive presentation of social complexity. This new textbook provides a rich resource for students (and teachers) from a wide range of life science disciplines.

Prof. Dr. Peter Kappeler (Ph.D., Duke University, 1992) holds a chair for Sociobiology/Anthropology at the University of Göttingen and is the head of the Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Unit at the German Primate Center. He studied Biology and Psychology at the University of Tübingen and at Duke University. As a postdoc, he worked at the German Primate Center and obtained his Habilitation in Tropical Ecology from the University of Würzburg. Before moving to his present position, he was the head of the Behavioral Ecology Department at Leipzig University. His research interests focus on the social systems of non-human primates. For the past 25 years, his empirical work has focused on the social and mating systems of Malagasy primates, carnivores and birds, which he and his students have been studying at Kirindy Forest. He has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed papers in top scientific journals, and authored or edited 15 books and special issues. He was a long-term editor of the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.