BOOK REVIEW

Carpenter Ants of the United States and Canada by Laurel D. Hansen and John H. Klotz. Comstock Publishing Associates, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. 204 pp. + 4 colored plates. ISBN 0-814-4262-1. Price US $35.00.

     The title is somewhat misleading. While all the species then known to the authors are included in a listing of the species, the book is concerned almost exclusively with those species that are structural or nuisance pests. Thus, they actually deal with only 23 of the 50 species they list. One of the 50, C. cuauhtemoc, is a Mexican species that is unlikely to be found in the United States.
     There are 6 chapters: Ecology; Morphology; Taxonomy and Distribution; Life History; Foraging; Economic Importance and Management. Each of these reads well in a spare, but informative style and concludes with a fairly complete list of references.
     Least satisfying is the chapter on Ecology. I think the reader would have been better served with more detail and, perhaps, combining this with the chapters on Life History and Foraging. This chapter is not truly about "ecology" in the most restricted sense. It is about Natural History. Unfortunately, Natural History, as a study, is no longer in vogue, although much that passes for "ecology" really is Natural History.
     The most serious problems arise in the chapter on Taxonomy and Distribution. The authors state that the acidopore, characteristic of the Formicinae, is the cloacal orifice. Not so; the cloacal orifice lies below the acidopore; the acidopore is a specialized nozzle-like opening for the discharge of the products of the venom gland. The worker caste of Camponotus is only usually characterized by the evenly convex mesosomal dorsum. There are many exceptions, including some species of Myrmentoma (C. bakeri) and Colobopsis. While workers of most species are polymorphic (p. 67) they are dimorphic in Colobopsis (correctly noted in their characterization of that subgenus on p. 70). Myrmaphaenus is not characterized by obliquely truncated frontal lobes (incidentally, frontal lobes are not defined in the chapter on Morphology).
     As noted above, this book is concerned with those species that are structural or nuisance pests. Almost any species might occasionally become a "nuisance" pest. Thus, in using the key to species there is no assurance that the species you found wandering around inside your house is actually in the key. I am willing to bet, for example, that many of the records in Arizona and New Mexico attributed to C. vicinus are actually based on the similar C. sansabeanus, a species not included in the key.
     I disagree, too, with the distribution maps for some of the species. There are no verified records of C. herculeanus or C. noveboracensis in either California or Nevada. I doubt that either C. laevigatus or C. clarithorax occur anywhere near as far south in the Lower California peninsula as they show. Records attributed to C. acutirostris in Arizona are almost certainly based on C. ocreatus. Creighton (1950), Hunt & Snelling (1975), MacKay and MacKay (2002) notwithstanding, there are no verified records of C. acutirostris in Arizona. C. semitestaceus is present along the California coastal ranges, at least as far north as the San Francisco Bay area.
     While there are many photographs throughout the book, their quality leaves much to be desired. They are black and white, with poor resolution and - too often - too little contrast to be meaningful.
     The remaining chapters (Life History; Foraging; Economic Importance and Management) are well done and certainly worth reading.
     While I do recommend this book, certainly one of the better of its kind, the chapter on Taxonomy and Distribution is disappointing. In part this results from the fact that neither author is a taxonomist and the book, in its present form, was apparently not reviewed by a myrmecologist prior to publication. The authors clearly relied too frequently on faulty data derived from unverified identifications.
     This caveat aside, this book is worth the price and I recommend it to anyone interested in ants and their behavior and biology. Definitely worth the price.
One final gripe: the jacket illustration is awful!

Roy R. Snelling, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90007. antmanrs@nhm.org

REFERENCES

CREIGHTON, W.S. 1950. The ants of North America. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 104:1-585.

HUNT, J.H., and SNELLING, R.R. 1975. A checklist of the ants of Arizona. Arizona Academy of Science 10:20-23.

MACKAY, W.P. and MACKAY, E. 2002. The Ants of New Mexico (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). E. Mellen Press, Lewiston, 398 pp.