Animal Physiology and Biology
Animal physiology and biology (also often referred to as zoology) is a wide ranging area of the life sciences that refers to the structure and function of animals and the ways in which they interact with their environment. In its broadest sense, it includes the scientific disciplines of embryology, cell biology, developmental biology, endocrinology, immunology, biophysics, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology and a host of connected disciplines, as they relate to animals. The Reference Module in Life Sciences covers many of these components (and their parallels in plants and microbes) in major sections such as Ecology and Evolution, Cell Biology and Genetics, Molecular Biology, Biophysics and Comparative Immunology, and I refer interested readers to these sections, as appropriate. In this Animal Physiology and Biology section, we mainly focus on the behavior and welfare of animals and their physiological and sensory responses to their environment.