Review

Book reviews in this article: What do you get if you cross a cladist with a behavioral ecologist? Phylogeny, ecology and behavior —Daniel R. Brooks and Deborah A. McLennan. Incidit in scyllam qui vult vitare charybdim Phylogeny, ecology and behavior Daniel R. Brooks and Deborah A. McLennan.     

W. K. Brooks's role in the history of American biology

Conclusion The results of this study indicate that the reputation of W. K. Brooks was aided significantly by historical circumstances. The first of these factors was the unique historical role of Johns Hopkins University in American graduate education. The second was the impact of European experimentalism on American biologists and the consequent increase of experimentation in this country.Johns Hopkins, as an institution, greatly aided in the selection, nurture, and placement of Brooks's students. To these institutional forces, Brooks did add direction toward marine biology and facilities for marine research. Also, his teaching methods—which were reinforced by his own natural quietness and his poor health—did encourage self-reliance: Brooks simply could not dominate over the day-to-day activities of his students.The impact of European experimentalism was largely responsible for giving American biologists new approaches to problems which were beginning to assume major importance in biology. Several of Brooks's students, notably E. B. Wilson, T. H. Morgan, and Ross Harrison, were involved in this transfer of approaches and problems to America. In addition, a large number were influenced by working at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, where many of these new approaches were being used—in some cases for the first time, in this country. Both of these historical circumstances detract from Brooks's personal importance as an influential and directing force.That Brooks allowed his students to pursue their own research with comparative freedom is indisputable. Perhaps this is the criterion for an outstanding teacher. But the fact remains that none of his best students followed Brooks's own line of investigation or his own method of research. It is less important here to evaluate Brooks as a teacher than to understand his influence on the direction of biological thought in the twentieth century. This study suggests that his influence was less important in terms of setting a direction for research than has previously been believed. What it is apparent that Brooks accomplished was the setting forth of biological topics in a larger context through his insistence on the relevance of philosophy to scientific research. How much this directly influenced his students, especially those outstanding individuals who later made important advances, is difficult to determine. This paper has tried to show that, in terms of available evidence, Brooks does not seem to have had the profound influence on early twentieth-century biology that some historians have claimed.     

Historical biogeography of Southeast Asia and the West Pacific,or the generality of unrooted area networks as historical biogeographic hypotheses

Aim Unrooted area networks are perhaps a general way in which different historical biogeographical patterns may be combined. Location Southeast Asia up to the West Pacific, Australia, South America. Methods Unrooted area networks based on Primary Brooks Parsimony Analysis of different data sets of Southeast Asian–West Pacific, Australian and South American clades. Results A large Brooks Parsimony historical (cladistic) biogeographic analysis of Southeast Asia and the West Pacific gave a meaningful result when all clades (representing different historical biogeographic patterns) were united into one matrix and an unrooted area network was produced. This network showed geographically adjacent areas as neighbours, which is interpreted as clades dispersing and speciating as soon as areas rafted towards each other. This pseudo‐vicariance mechanism, together with the very limited, mainly linear dispersal possibilities, a few large, widespread clades with many endemic species, and the large overlap in distributions displayed by different patterns, may explain the peculiar result. When applied to examples from other areas (bird data from Australia and South America), unrooted area networks for all data perform very poorly. Main conclusions Unrooted historical general area networks are not universally applicable. In general, it is better to split historical patterns a priori and analyse them separately.     

Evolution in the pentastomids

The Pentastomida, or tongue worms, form an aberrant group of annulated endoparasites little known to most parasitologists and veterinarians. Although there is no doubt of their affiliation to arthropods, textbooks often rank the Pentastomida as a separate phylum. Riley's many publications on the group have 'promoted it from the realm of the completely unknown to the semi-obscure', but still much research is needed on their basic biology, as little is known about their biochemistry, ecology or their evolutionary relationships. This review by Rolf Haugerud is intended to inspire curiosity about the Pentastomida by discussing their evolution in relation to their phylogeny, host relationships, geographic distribution, transmission and impact.     

Would Industrial Ecology Exist without Sustainability in the Background?

Industrial ecology rests historically—even in a short lifetime of 15 years or so—on the metaphorical power of natural ecosystems. Its evolution parallels the rise of concerns over unsustainability, that is, the threats to our world's ability to support human life the emergence of sustainability as a normative goal on a global scale. This article examines the relationships between industrial ecology and sustainability and argues that, in its historical relationship to classical ecology models, the field lacks power to address the full range of goals of sustainability, however defined. The classical ecosystem analogy omits aspects of human social and cultural life central to sustainability. But by moving beyond this model to more recent ecosystem models based on complexity theory, the field can expand its purview to address sustainability more broadly and powerfully. Complexity models of living systems can also ground alternative normative models for sustainability as an emergent property rather than the output of a mechanistic economic model for society's workings.     

Gaining Perspective on What We've Lost: The Reliability of Encoded Anecdotes in Historical Ecology

Historical data are essential in fisheries management and conservation, especially for species that suffered significant population declines prior to ecological data collection. Within the field of historical marine ecology, studies have relied on anecdotal evidence, such as written accounts by explorers and interviews of different generations of resource users, to demonstrate the former abundance of certain species and the extent of their ranges. Yet, do we all agree on how these anecdotes are interpreted? This study examines the way that different people interpret anecdotes extracted from historical narratives. We outsource a survey to 50 randomly selected people using Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) and ask them to ‘code’ historical anecdotes based on their perceived abundance of species. We perform intercoder reliability tests to show that people''s perceptions of historical anecdotes are generally consistent. The results speak to the reliability of using people''s perceptions to acquire quantitative data, and provide novel insights into the use of anecdotal evidence to inform historical ecology.     

American precursors of evo-devo: ecology,cell lineage,and pastimes unworthy of the Deity

The American precursors of evo-devo have numerous phenotypes. Fritz Müller, a German émigré living in Brazil, was one of the first post-Darwin evolutionary biologists to look seriously at the roles of larvae in constraining and permitting evolutionary change. His book, Für Darwin, contains the germs of numerous ideas concerning recapitulation, larval ecology, punctuated equilibrium, and canalization. William Keith Brooks was interested in larval ecology and the mechanisms that promoted selectable variation. One of his students, E. B. Wilson, followed one of Mülller’s paths and brought the notion of embryonic homologies into the area of developmental biology and animal classification. Frank R. Lillie took a different page out of Müller and emphasized larval adaptations.     

Introduction: From the "New Ecology" to the New Ecologies

An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project within the compass of the idealism v. materialism debate. Culture was an adaptive tool, instrumental rather than formal; it was intelligible with respect to its material effects, not—as the idealists would maintain—in terms of itself, as an autonomous, self-determining order of reality. This argument was mounted with respect to bounded, stable, self-regulating, local, or at best regional entities and the environment they inhabited. All of the premises of the earlier ecology have since been challenged, and today's ecologies—symbolic, historical, and political—radically depart from the reductions and elisions of the ecological anthropology of the past. In particular, the new ecologies override the dichotomies that informed and enlivened the debates of the past—nature/culture, idealism/materialism—and they are informed by the literature on transnationalist flows and local-global articulations. This introduction positions Rappaport's work within this historical shift from a polarized field of mutually exclusive frameworks to today's synthetic new ecologies and their antireductive materialism. Rappaport's work, produced over three decades, serves, in and through its own transformations, as a bridge between the reductive materialism of the past and a new-materialist ecology. [Rappaport, ecological anthropology, materialism v. idealism, the new materialism]     

Perspectives on Global-Change Archaeology

In this article, I explore the characteristics of global-change archaeology as an emerging field of research. Global-change archaeology seeks to document and apply historical knowledge of past human–environmental interactions to the understanding of contemporary environmental problems and management and planning for future sustainability. It takes place within an interdisciplinary research structure and is situated within the explanatory contexts of historical science and humanistic history with close links to historical and political ecology. Both history and agency play important roles in the practice of global-change archaeology. Past human decision making in the context of cultural attitudes and perceptions also has a significant role in the archaeology of global change.     

Symposium Introductory Remarks: A Brief History of Aquatic Microbial Ecology

ABSTRACT This report serves to introduce the symposium on food chains and food webs that is jointly sponsored by the Society of Protozoologists and the Phycological Society of America. A brief history of the field of aquatic microbial ecology is presented with an emphasis on the development of theoretical models that have directed the course of research — research that has shaped the development of new and more complex models of the present. the paper aims to provide historical background for all symposium participants and an introduction to the specific presentations of the four guest speakers.     

Between a Pristine Myth and an Impoverished Future

Early European naturalists saw Amazonian landscapes as pristine, but modern research has found a complex historical ecology, similar to that of other tropical and temperate regions. Although the pristine myth has been thoroughly debunked, too many biodiversity researchers fail to incorporate historical ecology into their analyses. For a world society out of balance with its natural resource base, careful interpretation is essential to understand trends, including impoverishment of planetary biodiversity. If world society avoids civilizational collapse, parts of Amazonia's historical ecology can contribute to future sustainability and improved survival of its biodiversity.     

Multiscale determinants of parasite abundance: A quantitative hierarchical approach for coral reef fishes

During recent decades, there have been numerous attempts to identify the key determinants of parasite communities and several influential variables have been clarified at either infra-, component or compound community scales. However, in view of the possible complexity of interactions among determinants, the commonly-used exploratory and statistical modelling techniques have often failed to find meaningful ecological patterns from such data. Moreover, quantitative assessments of factors structuring species richness, abundance, community structure and species associations in parasite communities remain elusive. Recently, because they are ideally suited for the analysis of complex and highly interactive data, there has been increasing interest in the use of classification and regression tree analyses in several ecological fields. To date, such approaches have never been used by parasitologists for field data. This study aims to both introduce and illustrate the use of multivariate regression trees in order to investigate the determinants of parasite abundance in a multi-scale quantitative context. To do this, we used new field epidemiological data from 1489 coral reef fishes collected around two islands in French Polynesia. We evaluated the relative effect and interactions of several host traits and environmental factors on the abundance of metazoan parasite assemblage at several scales and assessed the impact of major factors on each parasite taxon. Our results suggest that the islands sampled, the host species and host size are equal predictors of parasite abundance at a global scale, whereas other factors proved to be significant predictors of a local pattern, depending on host family. We also discuss the potential use of regression trees for parasitologists as both an explorative and a promising predictive tool.     

Schistosomiasis and malaria: another piece of the crossreactivity puzzle

The recent discovery that individuals living in endemic areas have antibodies in their sera that are crossreactive for both helminth and malaria parasites raises important questions both of the interpretation of existing immunoepidemiological data and of the basic biology of the host and the parasites. One such shared antigen (SmLRR) has now been cloned and has, therefore, opened up an intriguing and exciting field of research for immunologists and parasitologists.     

Selection of novel ligands from phage display libraries: an alternative approach to drug and vaccine discovery?

Phage display involves the production and screening of large numbers of random peptide sequences of a specific length expressed on the surface of phage particles. This approach provides a powerful tool to probe the molecular basis of many biological processes, including host-parasite interactions. Phage display libraries have been used to study the binding specificity of numerous peptides and protein domains. Practical applications include the identification of peptide sequences that bind with high affinity to antibodies, enzymes or receptors, and that may serve as diagnostics and vaccine or drug candidates. Here, David Jefferies outlines the concept of phage display and summarizes recent developments in the field, with emphasis on those that may be of interest to parasitologists.     

Contemporary trait change in a classic ecological experiment: rapid decrease in alewife gill‐raker spacing following introduction to an inland lake

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Ecology in the service of biological control: the case of entomopathogenic nematodes

 Biological control manipulations of natural enemies to reduce pest populations represent large-scale ecological experiments that have both benefited from and contributed to various areas of modern ecology. Unfortunately, economic expediency and the need for rapid implementation often require that biological control programs be based more on trial and error than on sound ecological theory and testing. This approach has led to some remarkable successes but it has also produced dismal failures. This point is particularly well illustrated in the historical development and use of entomopathogenic nematodes for the biological control of insect pests. Intense effort has focused on developing these natural enemies as alternatives to chemical insecticides, in part because laboratory assays indicated that these nematodes possess a broad host range. This illusory attribute launched hundreds of field releases, many of which failed due to ecological barriers to infection that are not apparent from laboratory exposures, where conditions are optimal and host-parasite contact assured. For example, the entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae is a poor choice to control scarab larvae because this nematode uses an ambusher foraging strategy near the soil surface whereas the equally sedentary scarab remains within the soil profile, shows a weak host recognition response to scarabs, has difficulty overcoming the scarab immune response, and has low reproduction in this host. Conversely, two other nematodes, Heterorhabditis bacteriophora and S. glaseri, are highly adapted to parasitize scarabs: they use a cruising foraging strategy, respond strongly to scarabs, easily overcome the immune response, and reproduce well in these hosts. Increased understanding of the ecology of entomopathogenic nematodes has enabled better matches between parasites and hosts, and more accurate predictions of field performance. These results underline the importance of a strong partnership between basic and applied ecology in the area of biological control. Received: 15 July 1996 / Accepted: 5 November 1996     

Asymmetry of the os pubis: Implications for the Suchey‐Brooks method

Studies of skeletal development frequently document populational incidences of bilateral asymmetry. Degenerative morphological skeletal changes, attributed to age related and irregular ossification, may also progress asymmetrically, either as the result of asymmetric biomechanical factors expressed over the lifespan, asymmetric expression of physiological processes, or progressive magnification of asymmetry acquired previously during development. This study illustrates the effects of bilateral asymmetry on age at death estimates obtained from human skeletal remains. The Suchey‐Brooks method, which uses the pubic symphyseal face for age estimation (Katz and Suchey, Am J Phys Anthropol 69 1986 427–435), was selected for the study based on its widespread use. Asymmetry in the Suchey‐Brooks symphyseal age phases was found in over 60% of a sample composed of 20th century White male individuals from 18 to 86 years of age (N = 130). However, results suggest that the presence of asymmetry does not compromise the accuracy of the Suchey‐Brooks method if the morphologically older symphyseal face of an asymmetric individual is used to estimate age at death. In addition, weak directional asymmetry and a correlation between age and asymmetry were found. This suggests that a comparison of asymmetry in this area with that in other skeletal areas, where the factors originating and influencing asymmetry are better understood, may be useful in better understanding the biological processes which underlie the age markers used in the Suchey‐Brooks method. Am J Phys Anthropol 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.