Paul M. Choate, Jr.
University Press of Florida, Gainesville
2003, 197 pp.
Price: $34.95, "Flexibind" softcover
ISBN 0-8130-2583-4

 

Tiger beetles (Carabidae: Cicindelinae) are among the more popular insect groups collected by amateurs. Choate states that his book, A Field Guide and Identification Manual for Florida and Eastern U.S. Tiger Beetles, was written to enable nonentomologists to identify tiger beetle species and to provide an access point into the literature. He has certainly achieved these goals. Each species found in the eastern United States is illustrated, almost always with a color photograph including separate shots of live adults in the field and pinned specimens. It is particularly difficult to photograph live tiger beetles, and the numerous images in this volume make it remarkable.

The table of contents lists four main sections: Introduction, Glossary, Works Cited, and an Index. The introduction includes 10 sections (really, the body of the book) covering the basics of identification via a couplet key, illustrated species pages, and a photographic catalog, as well as sections detailing species concepts, habitats, and Florida’s geological history.

The first sections provide information on classification, description of external morphology, a section titled "Ecology" that begins with a paragraph on collection techniques, and some commentary on larval ecology. There is a separate section on predators and parasites (why not include this within the Ecology section?), and sections on collecting and preserving adult and larval tiger beetles, and locating and photographing tiger beetles.

I have two problems with the introductory sections. The description of how to label specimens includes no mention of GPS data (latitude/longitude). Hand-held GPS units are no longer costly. Anyone now conducting scientific sampling should be including geo-coordinate data on their specimen data labels. Without these data, these text-based locality names will, at some point, have to be tediously geo-referenced if their information is going to be made useful. Choate’s failure to include mention of GPS data in his collecting protocol is most unfortunate.

My second gripe concerns the almost complete avoidance of tiger beetle larvae as a means to study these organisms. Although Choate gives some information about the ecology of the larvae and how to collect them, the book lacks any means to identify larvae. Despite Choate’s laudable emphasis on conservation issues, nowhere does he explain that larvae can be just as useful as adults, if not more so, to conservation efforts.

The section on habitats is valuable and has both text and photographs. This section in particular is absent from the similar book, Northeastern Tiger Beetles: A Field Guide to Tiger Beetles of New England and Eastern Canada by J. G. Leonard and R. T. Bell (1999).

I dislike Choate’s frequent and casual use throughout the book of specific epithets without generic names. Zoological nomenclature requires a species be referred to by its binomen (which, ironically, Choate explains in his section on Species Criteria).

A section devoted to Florida’s geological history and its relationship to animal and plant distributions seems out of place in a field guide devoted to identification and collection. The text of this section is primarily (>80%) composed of lengthy quotations taken from miscellaneous literature relevant to Florida’s paleobiological history. The few questions raised about tiger beetle distributions in the last paragraph of this 12-page section are not answered satisfactorily. No new data or tests of hypotheses are presented. It is not apparent why this section was included.

Following the section on Geological history are sections on the definition of the species rank, the classification and identification of tiger beetles, a list of species included in the book, a nicely illustrated section on morphological characters used for identification, and a couplet-based identification key. The discussion of species criteria includes no references more recent than 1974, which is unfortunate considering the enormous, and constantly growing, literature on the subject of species concepts. I didn’t test the identification keys, but for most users of this work, the photographs of the adults should allow confident identification of most species.

The heart of any field guide is the section on species accounts. Choate has titled this chapter "Distributions and Habitats." Each species is presented with a photo of a pinned specimen (or specimens if variation is great), a live specimen in the field (if available), a state map of eastern North America, a county map of Florida, and some short text. The presentation of the information is erratic; some species receive only a sentence or two, often without habitat information (despite the chapter title), while others receive a full page of text. The distribution maps are generalized by state or county, which provides little more information than would a simple textual listing of states or counties. (Perhaps the lack of geo-coordinate data made the task of preparing detailed maps that display patterns of climate or habitat associations too time-consuming?) Although the photos are valuable in this section, the information is sparse and simply pales in comparison to that presented in Leonard and Bell (1999) or the other major tiger beetle field guide of this region (Knisley and Schultz 1997). The presentation on identification features, life history, larvae, literature records throughout a species’ range, or informative notes is inconsistent.

Despite the excellent photographs associated with each species account in this section, the following, last section of the book is a photographic catalog of the species, which seems to be redundant and unnecessary (because all the species are illustrated equally well in the preceding section).

In short, this book fills in the distributional gaps left by Leonard and Bell (1999) and Knisely and Schultz (1997). I recommend anyone interested in eastern North American tiger beetles obtain all three of these works.

References Cited

Leonard, J. G., and R. T. Bell. 1999. Northeastern tiger beetles: a field guide to tiger beetles of New England and eastern Canada. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.

Knisely, C. B., and T. D. Schultz. 1997. The biology of tiger beetles and a guide to the species of the South Atlantic States. Martinsville: Virginia Museum of Natural History Special Publication 5.

 

Derek S. Sikes
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Connecticut Storrs, CT, 06269
American Entomologist
Vol. 49, No.4, Winter 2003