Notes from Underground:MacKayreview

Notes from
Underground

BOOK REVIEW

The Ants of New Mexico
by William and Emma Mackay
Edwin Mellen Press. 2002. ISBN -0-7734-6884-6

I am completely in awe of the amount of work involved in producing a book such as Bill and Emma Mackay's "The Ants of New Mexico". Thus, it is with some hesitation that I must say I am disappointed with the result of the Mackays' ambitious undertaking to produce an up-to-date regional fauna comprising the nearly 300 species of ants known to occur or likely to occur in New Mexico. In this review, I will take the tack of proceeding through the more disagreeable aspects of the book, then to what I like about it. This will allow me to end on a positive note; this as a gesture which I hope will be understood by the authors as indicative of my genuine respect for their effort and for them as people.

High price and low production values
If this were a handsome, well bound and well-edited volume, the $129.00 price tag would be acceptable. Sadly, the stark black print on white cover of this book is completely uninviting, and the reproduction quality of the plates at the end of the book is so poor as to be embarrassing. The binding of my copy is very uneven generally, and the upper 3 cm of the first 13 pages lack binding altogether, thus hanging loose, the remainder of their length imperfectly attached to the rest of the volume. Numerous typographical errors scattered throughout lead me to the conclusion the volume was never properly proofed. In preparation for this review, I went to the Edwin Mellen Press website to find about more about this publisher and discovered that it is respected venue for publication of scholarly books in the social sciences and humanities.
Curiously, I could find no mention at the Mellen website of "The Ants of New Mexico", nor any other titles in biology or other "hard" sciences.

Formatting issues
I find it totally incomprehensible why the amply-margined 5.75 by 9 inch pages of this book were printed in dual column format, since pages of this size easily lend themselves to reading with text fully spanning the width between the margins. In reading the keys, the two-column format progresses from merely irritating and wasteful of space to downright confusing. The interposition of numbered figures among the numbered lugs of the keys repeatedly left me struggling to find my place as I tried to read through them (notwithstanding the different fonts of the figure captions and the lugs of the key couplets). This was particularly the case in the genus key (pp.16-26) containing 70 numbered figures interspersed among (or within!) 42 numbered couplets ( and in some cases splitting the text of individual lugs!). In the species keys later in the book, with mostly three-digit figure numbers and fewer, generally longer couplets, I was somewhat less foiled by this format. In other regional ant faunas I compared to this one, I have found the format of the keys Steve Shattuck's Australian Ants the easiest on the eye and the brain. There, the text spans the page and the figures, while appropriately interspersed, are centered, are not captioned (and do not need to be), and are clearly separated from the couplets, never dividing a couplet or lug. The grouping of figures in a discrete portion of the page, as in the Wheelers' works is another, preferable approach.

The Introduction
The introduction of "The Ants of New Mexico" rambles, without subheadings, through a variety of subjects, including biogeography and vegetation of New Mexico, collecting equipment and strategies, curation of specimens, rearing of live ants and internet resources on ants. With the dynamic nature of the internet, the last of these was doomed to be out of date and incomplete almost the moment it was written, but two other things in the introduction irked me more. The first was the use of the second person ("you") to address the reader. While outwardly a reader-friendly approach, this usage seems out of place in a scholarly work, and worse, comes across as preachy in the sections on methodology.

This brings me to the second irksome issue, namely, the instructions on mounting ants on points. The Mackays recommend an approach "most commonly used by other entomologists", that of bending down the tip of the point to parallel the pin, and gluing the right side of the ant to the bent portion. I have looked at hundreds of thousands of small insect specimens in collections around the world and can say without reservation that this is not the technique used to mount most of them. Furthermore, mounting ant specimens on bent tips is a technique preferred by no other myrmecologist I know. With increasing use of ventrally-located characters in ant morphotaxonomy, there is something to be said for a mounting technique which leaves the underside exposed for study, but it is in my opinion strongly preferably not to bend the tip of the point to do so. This procedure not only damages the integrity of the point, but in addition, the original angle of the bend is never maintained, resulting in every specimen mounted on a given pin ending up at a different and unpredictable viewing angle, impeding efficiency of study. I find preferable the Wheelers' approach of mounting a specimen on its side on an unbent point, along with a couple of others in the more conventional point-straddling position on the same pin. This provides ready viewing of the still predominantly dorsal and lateral suite of characters useful for identifying ants. The Wheelers' approach provides for a common and readily anticipated viewing angle of the colony sample, without extra time taken to constantly reposition. The inconvenience of looking at a sample of three ants on pin with bent-down points at different angles reminds me of the "good old days" of studying ants mounted on cards in umpteen different positions.

The list of species
      The list of species is the core of the book and is of course much more than a list. Included are keys to and accounts of the distribution and natural history of 239 species and subspecies known to occur in New Mexico. Also included are another 54 species that might occur in the state. The keys are mostly novel and generally clearly worded, and were it not for the aforementioned disruptive placement of the figures, appear relatively simple to work through. Occasional typos and repetition of words usually do not seriously impede progress. The species accounts discuss difficulties of identification and species likely to be confused with the one at hand, in a way that I would qualify as honest, but possibly discouraging to the less experienced. In one case, the discussion of Dorymyrmex flavus, the authors cite recent papers by on the taxon, but appear either not to have actually read them, or at least, didn't understood them (especially the more recent one by R. R. Snelling). Thus, their attempt to render clarity to the situation fails utterly. Fortunately, this seems to be a rather uncommon exception to the usually more lucid discussions.

      Regarding situations of species occurring in physical proximity to one another, I would have preferred more careful wording, to say the very least. The Mackays lump nearly every situation in which ants have been found together under a rock or in a log, together with genuine mixed-species nests, under the verbal phrase "nesting together". An experienced myrmecologist can sort out these cases from memory and experience into those situations where the ants merely nest close together in the same microhabitat (which may result in temporary co-mingling of species without aggression when the two proximate nests are disturbed), as opposed to those of different species genuinely inhabiting a single nest, as in the case of the social parasites, or even cases of predation by one upon another. I consider it a serious flaw of these discussions that no clear distinction is made between what is, in one case, a community ecology description and, in the other, a condition of intranidal colony composition. This could lead to perpetuation of the already too-common error among amateurs and even non-myrmecologist scientists, that of not understanding the important distinction that two species living next-door to one another is completely different from two living in the same house.

      I perceive other disturbing bits of confusion in the discussions of parasitic species. First, the Mackays use the term "enslave" with reference to non-dulotic species found in cohabitation with a temporary host species. Whatever the merits of this anthropomorphic term, it has never been used by any other myrmecologists to refer to any other than truly dulotic relationships. Then, for the dulotic species, the authors appear to repeat host species records from the literature indiscriminately, although without citation. My own study of hundreds of Polyergus and Formica sanguinea group samples in collections over the last fifteen years convinces me of two points: 1) Only a minority of samples have host workers included and/or a note on the host species identity and 2) Either the host, the parasite or both are frequently misidentified. Thus, literature records must be taken with a huge block of salt. I would have much preferred the Mackays report host associations only from their own collections in New Mexico, or at least that they had discriminated their own from literature accounts. (A full-scale review of host association of dulotic North American formicines is sorely needed.)

Summary

Summarizing from above:
1) I wish the book was less expensive and more
attractive.
2) I wish the writing was more professional in style, had been more tractably formatted, and had been thoroughly proofread and professionally reviewed.
3) I wish that the comments reviewers certainly might have offered if they could have, would have been considered seriously, and that appropriate re-writing would have ensued before going to press.
4) So, if a student turned in this book as a class project to me, I would give it the following grades: B- minus for content, C-minus for style.

So, after al this, what do I like about this book?

1) I am always thankful to have yet another set of keys to re-check determinations of ant specimens. I think the Mackays' keys could be particularly useful in this regard, since many are entirely new coinings, rather than simple modifications or direct quotations
of previously published materials.

2) The gaps in the distribution maps, and the listing of species likely to occur in New Mexico but not yet found there, should both serve as stimulus for both new and old students of ants to redouble their efforts in this rather poorly studied area.

3) The references to the latest keys at the head of each genus account (although not the latest or not cited in a few cases) can provide a useful inroad to the most recent literature on taxonomy of North American ants.

4) An finally, this book makes available a sort of compendium and summary of the Mackays' long list of myrmecological works, much of which is published in obscure journals, not as easily acquired this single published volume.

James C. Trager