Stephen Taber has gone out fishing on the flood tide of fire ant literature, and has hauled in a ton of facts. Tossed in gleaming heaps on the deck of his 368-page book, these facts fill the entomologist with admiration, as well as with gratitude that any personal obligation to troll the murky depths of a hundred journals is thus obviated. Here, laid out in a row, are the ant-conquered southern states, extending east and west from the Alabama entry point. Here, still feebly and reflexively gasping and flipping their tails, are the bloated and ignominious fire ant eradication programs. Here are the problems of fire ant taxonomy, still tangled in a snarl of fishing line, but out in the open. The entomologist is not the only beneficiary of this bounty; the journalist should be equally pleased. News items, such as, "Fire Ants Kill Easter Chicks at Local Pet Store," a headline that the journalist belatedly realizes hardly requires actual text, can be nicely padded out with educational bits on the potency of fire ant venom and the murder of hatchling quail out in the countryside.
     While delighted to see this huge harvest of information all in one place, I would not want my understanding of fire ants to depend on this book. One can read the entire volume and still lack answers to reasonable questions about fire ants. Why are fire ants, especially the imported species, so much more aggressive around the nest than most other ants? How, exactly, do they so successfully displace other species? Why do they spread so rapidly in some regions and much slower in others? Why are some areas within their range wall-to-wall fire ants, while other areas have few nests? What forces brought about the decline of the devastating outbreaks of tropical fire ants in the Caribbean, and does this decline offer hope elsewhere? Symptomatic of this weakness in synthesis, the overviews of past and future fire ant scenarios seem questionable. The statement that one of the now-rejected chemical controls "might have done the job" strikes me as one of those retroactive fantasies of omnipotence typical of us middle-aged males. By the time such control was begun, the red imported fire ant had dispersed widely. Even if we modern experts had been in charge, we could not have stopped a widespread, highly mobile, generalist species that reproduces rapidly, is easily relocated by commerce, and is beautifully preadapted to the habitat disturbances diagnostic of the ecological niche of our own species. The vision, complete with map, of future distribution shows the red imported fire ant sweeping up the West Coast to Canada. This seems highly unlikely: the extremes of temperature in Seattle might not be too cold for fire ants, but the northern west coast marine climate is unfavorable to a broad spectrum of ants for other reasons.
     It is easy for inaccuracies to creep in when one is dealing in an uncritical and non-selective way with a large literature (the list of references takes up 56 pages of tiny print). For this reason, one needs to exercise judgement before quoting from the book. For example, Ernst Mayr did not actually state or imply that "the introduction of an exotic is good for all but the invader's closest competitors because the presence of an additional species increases biodiversity." Ants would not make "ideal pollinators" were it not for pollen-inhibiting chemicals, because ants travel everywhere on foot, automatically making them lousy pollinators, irrespective of their body chemistry. The function of the elaiosome on seeds of a species of violet is not to "save its seeds from fire ant predation." Polygyne fire ant nests that bud off daughter nests are not an example of "asexual reproduction." In the key to species one must check the "dorsolateral junction of the propodeum," a hitherto unknown feature, which is absent from the glossary. There are many more of these little mistakes, and also many places where it would be easy to get the wrong impression about some aspect of fire ant biology.
     I do not recommend this book for the more sensitive myrmecologist, who would find cause to cringe and twitch on almost every page. For tougher specialists, this book is a great labor-saving compendium.
   

Mark Deyrup