L
Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 247 (2000) 131–133
www.elsevier.nl / locate / jembe
Book review
Crustaceans and the Biodiversity Crisis (Proceedings of4th International Crustacean Congress),
edited by F.R. Schram and J.C. von Vaupel Klein; Brill, Leiden; 1999; 1021 pp.; Ngl 495.00, US$ 291.25; ISBN 90-04-11387-8.
This is a book about crustaceans, some of it is about biodiversity, but it does not, as far as I can see, identify any supposed crisis. In fact, the subtitle, Proceedings of the Fourth International Crustacean Congress, is more accurate; it is a classic example of that genre.
Nowadays, the publication of straight Proceedings is quite unusual. The proliferation of scientific journals, particularly from commercial publishing houses, and the pressure to maintain impartial, objective scientific standards, usually by means of peer review, has disadvantaged institutional publications and other long-standing outlets for scientific publishing. Put simply, there are two classes of scientific publication: there is the primary literature, the publication of original scientific research, placing it in the specialist context and convincing one’s scientific peers of its importance; subsequently there is the process of collating, sifting and reviewing all this new information, in the review journals, text-books, and books on particular topics. This volume attempts to span the two classes, though the bulk of it consists of the first: most of the articles present the results of original pieces of research reflecting the structure and content of the Congress.
The Congress was a large affair with over 500 delegates and as many papers, presented orally or by poster; the main themes were introduced by a few plenary speakers. Rather less than a third of the papers is being published in the two official volumes of Proceedings, the present book and a second one being published as a Special Volume of Crustaceana.
The titles of the five themes into which the papers have been sorted in the present volume are:
Biodiversity: Diversity in space and time (32 papers), Invasive Crustaceans; Biogeography (16 papers), Ecology and Behaviour; Larvae (10 papers), Physiology, Bichemistry and Genetics (17 papers), Fisheries and Aquaculture (1 paper)
The scientific disciplines and topics represented in these papers is, however, much wider than this. They range from palaeontology and zoogeography to new records, fine
132 Book review / J. Exp. Mar. Biol. Ecol. 247 (2000) 131 –133
structure and developmental biology, systematic and taxonomic analyses to ‘‘pure’’ physiology, biochemistry, and some molecular genetics. The inclusion of many studies of functional and comparative morphology, phylogenetics, cladistics shows that there is still activity in such fields. It is encouraging to see that studies of the ‘‘whole animal’’ are still alive and well in many quarters! There are 11 papers on higher crustacean taxa, 37 on decapods, 13 on amphipods, 8 on cirripedes, 5 on copepods, 2 on mysids and 1 each on euphausiids and anostracans. The papers in each section do not, therefore, provide a coherent treatise on the given themes, resulting as they do from papers offered to the Congress rather than commissioned under the various headings.
The book has been rigorously edited and it is well produced, to the high standard that we have come to expect of Dutch scientific publications. The contributed papers have been independently reviewed and revised, they all seem to be worthy of the primary scientific literature, and several are likely to become established by future citation. It does not seem appropriate in a book review to assess them individually; I leave that to scientific posterity! On the other hand, the four plenary lectures, on crustacean diversity in the Cambrian, on heart rate as a measure of cardiac performance, on crustacean physiology and colonization of land, and on the ‘‘phenotype-history-ecology nexus’’ are reviews or overviews of their own quite different topics that should be of interest to a wider readership of carcinologists.
The Swedish ‘‘Orsten’’ deposits, which Dieter Walossek and his colleagues have concentrated on for over a decade, provide a fascinating glimpse of Cambrian microfossils, in which crustaceans are prominent and already almost as diverse, in terms of major groups, as they are today. The study of heart rate is a cautionary tale by Brian McMahon, who questions the assumption that a range of physiological variables, which may be difficult to measure directly, can be derived indirectly from measurements of heart rate. The conclusion is that, in most cases, they cannot. The paper on crustacean colonization of land by Peter Greenaway is an up-to-date contribution to the age-old curiosity about successes and failures among the arthropods: two classes, the crustaceans and the insects, have each been enormously successful over geological time, the one in aquatic environments, the other on land. Why? There is no straightforward answer, but the study of exceptions, in this case of crabs that have emerged onto land, gives some illuminating pointers. The last of these articles has the enigmatic ‘‘Understanding biodiversity: the phenotype-history-ecology nexus’’, which starts with the premise that the eventual diversity (species richness) of a biotope is conditional on the history of what forms are available to colonize it, and by the range of ecological opportunities that the biotope offers to potential colonizers, but goes on to point out that little attention has been paid to the role of the phenotype, the nature of the organisms themselves. In a neat exposition, Alan Myers presents history as the Accumulator, ecology as the Controller, but phenotype as the fundamental Facilitator: without the right phenotype there would be no suitable organisms to be accumulated or controlled.
Book review / J. Exp. Mar. Biol. Ecol. 247 (2000) 131 –133 133 J.B.L. Matthews Scottish Association for Marine Science Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory P.O. Box 3 Oban, Argyll PA34 4AD UK
