Review: Ants of North America: A Guide to the Genera
Alex Wild

      The authors of this brand new guide, Brian Fisher and Stefan Cover, are the two lead instructors of the Ant Course. They have taken the collection of notes, keys and images that have served as an informal textbook for the North American version of the class and worked them up into a handy little guide for identifying the ant genera of North America. The book is small, the size of a standard field guide, and contains:

1. A beautifully illustrated taxonomic key to identify North American ants to the genus level. This key has been used for many years at the Ant Course, allowing any problems that students encountered with draft versions to be identified and fixed. The result is a key easier to use and less prone to misleading couplets than the generic keys in Bolton (1994) and Hoelldobler and Wilson (1990). The illustrations for the key are clean line drawings produced by professional artists, and are of exceptional quality.

2. Descriptions of each genus giving diagnostic features to identify them and a short paragraph on the natural history. Each genus is illustrated in color by one face-view and one side-view of a single representative species. The pictures may seem familiar, as they are standard Antweb images.

3. A working list of all the ant species known from Canada and the U.S.

4. A glossary of terms.

5. A list of taxonomic resources for identifying the ants of each genus to species.

While Ants of North America overall is a great little book, I have several caveats:

-This is not a book aimed at a general readership. The taxonomic keys in particular are written for a technical audience and assume that the reader has access to a relatively high-magnification stereomicroscope. If you plan on using the key, make sure you've got a good scope.

-If you just want to see the nice pictures, they are all taken from Antweb.org where they are publically available.

-If you already know your ant genera, you may not learn too much from this book. Although, the little summaries of the biology of each genus are quite good.

-Many of the genera covered by the book are those whose range just barely gets into the southern parts of the U.S., including, for example, Leptogenys, Atta, Acanthostichus, Cephalotes, and Cerapachys. A disproportionate share of the book is consequently given over to ants that most people in North America won't ever encounter. The effect is that the common ants over most of North America- the Camponotus, Temnothorax, Lasius, Aphaenogaster, Myrmica and so forth- don't get much space. Along these lines, the images chosen for the cover are just bizarre. Pseudomyrmex? Atta? Cephalotes? Labidus? It is as if the authors have Neotropics envy.

Ants of North America is a handy little book, and one that will become the standard reference for the North American fauna at the genus level for some time to come. I highly recommend it.

Alex Wild