? CHICAGO JOURNALS The Encyclopedia of Land Invertebrate Behaviour, by Rod Preston-Maf ham; Ken Preston- Mafham Review by: William G. Eberhard The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec, 1994), pp. 559-560 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3036527 Accessed: 25/07/2012 17:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http ://www.j stor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms .j sp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Quarterly Review of Biology. STOR http: //www .j stor.org DECEMBER 1994 NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS 559 The book itself is largely a collation of his numer- ous papers, but it is held together, to some extent, by four introductory chapters and three conclud- ing chapters. The remaining six chapters deal with specific issues such as dominance relations and mul- tiple queens or with specific species such as Ropalidia fasciata and Polistes canadensis. Ito's main conclusion is that, although "Kin-selection/inclusive fitness theory has created a new era in understanding the evolu- tion of insect sociality . . . the one sided view of kin-selection has also set a constraint on further studies. We can generate many new study projects by liberating ourselves from this view." The main argument of the so-called kin-selec- tion/inclusive fitness theory is that an altruistic trait could spread by natural selection if the benefit of the altruism (measured as the number of relatives reared) multiplied by the genetic relatedness be- tween the altruist and the relatives reared, is greater than the cost of altruism (measured by the number of offspring given up by the altruist) multiplied by the altruist's genetic relatedness to his or her offspring. What Ito means by a one-sided view of kin selection is the excessive concentration on above inequality being brought about by the ine- qualities in the genetic relatedness terms and rela- tively less attention to the possible role of inequali- ties in the cost and benefit terms. To a large extent Ito's critical conclusion is justi- fied, but things are changing rapidly and far more attention is being paid in recent times to measuring costs and benefits of altruism, thanks to the re- peated warnings by Ito and a large number of other social insect researchers. The book under review, however, is not without its faults. It is too much of a collection of papers; there has not been sufficient attempt to make it read like a book. Even though the publication date is 1993, the book does not pay sufficient attention to a number of recent theoretical developments in the field. There are also several problems with terminology and interpretations of the literature. The most serious problem with terminology is the inconsistent way in which the terms haplometrosis and pleometrosis are used, sometimes to refer to single and multiple egg layers, respectively, and sometimes to refer to single and multiple foundress associations, respectively. An example of inaccu- rate interpretation of the literature is seen when Ito uses a 1988 paper by Frumhoff and Baker to support his contention that kin-recognition abili- ties are well developed, but ignores a series of criti- cisms of that conclusion that appeared in the same journal in 1990. In my opinion, a serious shortcoming of this book is the lack of careful copy editing, which could have greatly improved the text in many places. Much more serious is the fact that some of the figures and tables are almost completely unintelli- gible. Figures 7.2 to 7.5 and 13.1 to 13.2 are glar- ing examples of what should not get past any copy editor. Given that the author is not a native English speaker and that this book is the result of his own efforts to translate a previous version published in Japanese, the blame falls more heavily on the copy editor and publisher. RAGHAVENDRA GADAGKAR , Ecological Sciences, Ja- waharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LAND INVERTEBRATE BE- HAVIOUR. By Rod Preston-Mafham and Ken Preston-Mafham. The MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts). $45.00. 320 p.; ill.; indexes of scientific names and com- mon names, and general index. ISBN: 0-262- 16137-0. 1993. Most professional biologists find both visual and intellectual beauty in the study of nature, and I think many of us would admit that this beauty is a substantial part of our motivation. We seldom succeed in simultaneously communicating, how- ever, the excitement of visual and intellectual beauty to nonspecialists. I think this book is as successful an attempt to do this as I have seen. The book combines coffee-table-quality color pho- tographs, often of exotic (and identified!) tropical species, with an easy-to-read text that quickly plunges into such esoteric topics as sperm precedence, op- erational sex ratios, and resource defense polyg- yny. Many of the photos are not just portraits of animals at rest, but illustrate unexpected, refined ways of making a living (e.g., a view of ants tend- ing homopterans is enlivened by a mosquito rob- bing honeydew from the mouth of a worker). The beautiful photographs, and the easy access to the text, which includes long figure captions and boxes describing particular stories, are in the style of a coffee-table nature book. But the text is not. The authors have perused a lot of recent literature, and in general they describe correctly the stories famil- iar to a specialist, plus some that were new and interesting to me. In places they also present origi- nal interpretations of their own (e.g., to explain the elaborate courtship rituals in spiders), marshalling data and arguments to support their views. The intellectual as well as the visual excitement of study- ing arthropod behavior comes through. This is not to say that I did not have reservations. The coverage of many groups other than insects and spiders (e.g., mites) is poor for a book that pretends to be "encyclopedic." The imbalance be- tween the different topics (134 pages for sexual 560 THE QJJARTERL Y REVIEW OF BIOLOGY VOLUME 69 behavior, 70 for parental care, 24 for egg laying, and 19 for defensive behavior) and the omission of others (e.g., foraging, feeding) also does not give a genuinely encyclopedic overview. Citations of published work are made only erratically (ap- parently the policy was to cite only those papers to which relatively large segments of text were ded- icated). Thus one is often not sure whether a given statement should be credited to the authors' own observations. When the authors do report observa- tions that are clearly their own, sample sizes and variations in behavior are almost never mentioned, so these observations can only be cited as tantaliz- ing anecdotes. The informal, often anthropomor- phic style, in combination with the enormous array of animals covered, also inevitably led to errors. For instance, the statement that nothing is known about sperm precedence in spiders is erroneous [e.g., Austad, "Evolution of sperm priority pat- terns in spiders," in R. L. Smith (ed.), Sperm Com- petition and the Evolution of Animal Mating Systems, Academic Press, New York, 1984]. The claim that the female Agelena spider is "unconscious" of what the male is doing with her is unsupportable. So in the end, I must recommend this book with a word of caution. But even for someone in the field, it succeeds in filling a very useful niche, illus- trating both the beautiful, exotic forms and colors of terrestrial invertebrates, and their equally beau- tiful and unexpectedly elaborate ways of life. WILLIAM G. EBERHARD, Biology, Smithsonian Tropi- cal Research Institute and Universidad de Costa Rica, Ciudad Universitaria, Costa Rica THE OSTRICH COMMUNAL NESTING SYSTEM. Mono- graphs in Behavior and Ecology. By Brian C. R. Bertram; Series Editors: John R. Krebs and Tim Clutton-Brock. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NewJersey). $35.00. viii + 196 p.; ill.; subject index. ISBN: 0-691-08785-7. 1992. A male ostrich and a female of his harem (named the major one) initiate a nest and both she and several other (minor) females lay communally at it. By the time she has laid about 11 eggs, the nest already contains over 20, and incubation by her and the male alone begins. Major females discrimi- nate against eggs of minor females, reducing the total average number of eggs actually incubated to 19. Hence, major females care for others' eggs. Explaining how such apparently altruistic behav- ior may have evolved is the main goal of this three- year field study at Tsavo West National Park in Kenya. The Bertrams's efforts to observe and recognize individually their elusive birds, monitoring nests with time-lapse photography or placing dummy fiberglass eggs equipped with temperature-record- ing devices (Chapter 2, "Methods"), revealed an intricate nesting system influenced by many eco- logical and social factors, most of which still remain poorly understood. Data on population dynamics (Chapter 3), breeding biology (Chapter 4), and ecology (Chapter 5) build up a scenario for the complex strategies adopted by males and major and minor females (Chapters 6 to 8). In "Discus- sion: The Evolution and Maintenance of the Com- munal Nesting System" (Chapter 9), Bertram puts together physiological, ecological, and compara- tive evidence to provide a logical explanation for this unusual behavior. Massive nest destruction (58%) by large preda- tors, coupled with a sparse vegetarian food supply (a factor that would perhaps deserve more atten- tion than that paid in the book), could have selected for extended and continuous biparental care. Male parental care is unusual among other polygynous birds and mammals, and female care is absent in other ratites. Both nutritional constraints on egg production and the increased risk of predation re- sulting from a prolonged laying period are invoked by Bertram as reasons why major females lay fewer eggs (11) than they can actually incubate (19), allow- ing minor hens (who might have lost their own nest while still laying at it as a major) to exploit their spare incubation capacity (p. 177). The book is easy to read, and the author puts special care into outlining the objectives, methods and limitations, as well as into considering alterna- tive hypotheses, for each and every finding. To criticize a bit, I found some meanness in the use of statistics (such as inferences made from raw data without any statistical test (see Chapter 8) or from too small sample sizes. For example, daily mortal- ity risks for nests during laying are computed sim- ply by dividing the total number of nest breakups by the total number of days (p. 83), which gives an estimate of 0.06 per day and predicts an optimal clutch size of eight eggs for a major female to start incubation (p. 122). However, fitting nest survival data (from Tables 5.2 and 5.5) to a negative expo- nential curve renders an estimate of 0.045 per day, which exactly predicts eleven eggs as the optimal clutch size. These minor flaws are not really im- portant for the study as a whole. I would recommend the book not only to special- ists in ostrich behavior or cooperative breeding but especially to graduate students who may find an excellent, entertaining example of how to deal with a field project from the very beginning, showing how scientific rigor and elegant simplicity can make a splendid combination. TOMAS REDONDO, Estacidn Biologica de Donana, CSIC, Sevilla, Spain