Overview

At the 1980 Christmas meetings of the American Society of zoologists in Seattle, Washington, the Division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry sponsored a symposium on the locomo- tion and exercise of arthropods. This book is an outgrowth of that symposium. To our knowledge, the symposium and this volume are the first attempts to deal with all of the major modes of locomotion (flight, swimming, and pedestrian travel) among the arthropods in a comprehensive fashion. The time seems propitious to focus on arthropod locomotion. In the last decade enormous strides have been made in understand- ing locomotion - both arthropod and vertebrate alike. There has been an explosion of new ideas, new techniques, and new data. These deserve greater attention and discussion than is possible in specialized journals. Hopefully this book will fill this gap; moreover, it should serve as a benchmark for newcomers to see what has happened to date and perhaps act as a launching pad for re- search to come. Whatever the case, a symposium volume such as this serves to highlight our current strengths and weaknesses. In the present case it reveals the relative abundance of information on flying and walking and the dearth of data available on swimming; it exposes the fact that insects and crustaceans are fairly well studied and arachnids are not.