The Other Insect Societies by James T. Costa

Commentary

Edward O. Wilson

This marvelously researched and comprehensive work fills a major gap in the literature on insect social behavior. Up until now attention to the subject has been almost entirely limited to the ants, bees, wasps, and termites, which rule the upper strata of organizational complexity. With the exception of a few summary articles, including those gathered in Social Behavior in Insects and Arachnids, the excellent 1997 compendium edited by J.C. Choe and B.J. Crespi, members of the great mass of less sophisticated insect and other arthropod species have gone largely unattended and generally ignored, except by entomologists specializing in them.
Consequently everything of interest and importance, insofar as general biologists and educated lay readers are aware, has started with the primitively eusocial ants, bees, wasps, and termites and gone from there to the eye-catching army ants, leafcutter ants, honeybees, mound-building termites, and other “superstars” of the social insect world. This neglect has left a huge gap in our understanding of the origin and full spread of insect social life. The parallel that immediately comes to mind is the treatment of the history of the Western Hemisphere as though it began in 1492.
James Costa, insect sociobiology’s equivalent of chief pre-Columbian historian, has filled a large part of this gap. He has done it as only a seasoned entomologist could accomplish it, with a full account of each major taxonomic group in turn, including the contextual information needed to understand the significance of the social behavior its constituent species display. Contextual coverage as developed by Costa, aiming to be less than encyclopedic but far more than bare-bones description of just the social behavior itself, gives us the information needed, as far as it exists, to interpret the behavior discovered to date. Costa routinely travels from taxonomy to anatomy, from physiology to ecology, and into broad issues of natural history to create in this book an overall mosaic of what the “other” insect societies are and what they have achieved across hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
The Other Insect Societies will henceforth be the standard reference work on the subject, and I expect it will prove greatly heuristic for biological researchers. Now we know what is known and what is not known. In the way a good field guide attracts and accelerates ecological research, this book will boost research on arthropods that would otherwise remain poorly studied, or neglected altogether. The result will be a major impact on studies of arthropod social behavior as a whole.

“Commentary” by Edward O. Wilson reprinted electronically by permission of the publisher from the OTHER INSECT SOCIETIES by James T. Costa, With a Foreword by Bert Hölldobler and a Commentary by Edward O. Wilson, pp. xiii-xiv, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2006 by President and Fellows of Harvard College.

All rights not specifically granted in this agreement are reserved.