Roger L. Blackman and Victor F. Eastop
The Natural History Museum
John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England
2006; 1439 pages
Price: $440.00 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-471-48973-5

 

Blackman and Eastop’s Aphids of the World’s Crops (2000) and Aphids of the World’s Trees (1994) have proven themselves indispensable for anyone wanting to identify aphids associated with these plant groups. For the past several years, aphidologists have been anticipating the completion of the series with what some had dubbed “the aphids of everything else.” It is with this latest publication that the authors have created the first comprehensive host-based identification guide for a significant group of phytophagous insects.

The sheer magnitude of the work, covering over 3,000 aphid species, required its publication in two volumes. The first volume, 1,024 pages and two and a half inches thick, contains a five-page overview on using the books, including figures explaining morphological terminology. The remainder of Volume 1 is devoted to a species-level alphabetical listing of host plants, their associated aphids, and, when applicable, a dichotomous key to the aphid species colonizing a host genus. With the previous two books, this is the first comprehensive listing of plant hosts and their associated aphid fauna since Patch’s (1938) Food-Plant Catalogue of the Aphids of the World.

 Occasionally, a species key will direct the user to a separate key to the 35 most polyphagous aphids, a necessary shortcut obviating the need to include those species repetitively in a large number of host-based keys. The keys are based only on adult apterous viviparous females (except where stated otherwise), although fundatrices of some species are readily keyed, as we found with Myzus persicae (Sulzer). A serious but necessary limitation is that the keys should be used only with aphids actually colonizing the host, where host association can be made unequivocally.

The much thinner Volume 2 (415 pages) includes a brief text description of each aphid species from Volume 1, often including information about host plants, virus transmission, world distribution, biology, ecology, and chromosome number. The volume also includes a bibliography, albeit including only those publications not listed previously in the authors’ other books, Remaudière and Remaudière’s (1997) aphid catalog, or Smith’s (1971) bibliography of aphid literature. Two hundred and fifty-two photomicrographs of slide-mounted specimens are helpful in providing a basic view of the aphids’ morphology. Finally, an index merely lists aphid specific epithets for associating them with the correct generic names, a necessity in anticipating future new combinations.

Whereas the keys in Aphids on the World’s Crops are readily useable by most trained entomologists with a stereoscope, Aphids on the World’s Herbaceous Plants and Shrubs is similar to Aphids on the World’s Trees in requiring some knowledge of aphid morphology and biology and the use of slide-mounted material. For these reasons, entomologists who identify aphids regularly will be the primary users of the work, and indeed it will be the first (and often only) work consulted by most of them wanting to identify aphids on herbaceous plants. Entomologists who do not regularly work with aphids will find the keys hard to use and the abbreviations and morphological terminology daunting, although the food plant catalog will be useful to anyone. The keys to aphids on host genera are complete and efficient, albeit no easier to use than most aphid dichotomous keys, and a reference collection of aphid specimens will still be helpful for correctly identifying many species. The keys also include and work well for some known but as-of-yet undescribed species, as we found with an undescribed Macrosiphum species on Spirea. The authors had previously published synonyms they uncovered during the development of the book (Eastop and Blackman 2005).

No work of this size can be perfect, and there are a number of minor errors such as missing parentheses on the names of some authorities, misspellings, and an amusing extraneous question mark in the title on page 1. More seriously, there are some larger omissions that might have been easily filled in, given the computer indexing and cross-referencing that must have been integral to the project. We would like to have seen a family-level host list with all the plant species listed below. The user could then use keys to closely-related plant species and broaden his or her material for identification, or, if the host plant itself were only identified to the family level, as is often the case, the user could work through keys to several plant genera within the family. Secondly, the keys have a paucity of images. Although the inclusion of more drawings and/or pictures to illustrate the couplets would perhaps have increased the size of the tome beyond feasibility, it would have made the keys more usable, particularly for non-specialists. Some may point out that although the book functions as a catalog of the aphids on various plants, the list of hosts for any particular aphid species is missing (the aphid species treatments generally discuss host associations broadly). This omission is necessary and understandable because the actual recorded list of host plant species is extremely long for polyphagous aphid species and poorly known for many others; the inclusion of such a list would have been of marginal utility.

To dwell on these items, however, would be to detract from the phenomenal amount of work that went into these extremely valuable books. The tomes are a testament to the abilities and knowledge of the authors, of whom all aphidologists should be proud. The list price is steep, but most users of the book will soon find themselves wondering how they ever managed to do without it.

 

References

Blackman, R.L. and V.F. Eastop. 1994.Aphids on the World’s Trees. Cab International, Wallingford, England.

Blackman, R.L. and V.F. Eastop. 2000.Aphids on the World’s Crops. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England.

Eastop, V.F. and R.L. Blackman. 2005.Some new synonyms in Aphididae (Hemiptera: Sternorrhyncha). Zootaxa 1089: 1-36.

Patch, E.M. 1938. Food-Plant Catalogue of the Aphids of the World. The Maine Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 393: 35-431.

Remaudière, G. and M. Remaudière. 1997.Catalogue of the World’s Aphididae. INRA, France.

Smith, C.F. 1971.Bibliography of the Aphididae of the World. North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station Technical Bulletin 216.

Colin Favret and Gary L. Miller
USDA, ARS, Systematic Entomology Lab
Beltsville, MD
E-mails: crf@uiuc.edu, gary.miller@ars.usda.gov

American Entomologist
Vol. 54, No. 1, Spring 2008