Communicating in science; 2nd edn

BOOK

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not only helped establish the emerging discipline of animal behaviour but also ensured that ethologists viewed behavioural questions from an evolutionary perspective. Michael Bell and Susan Foster’s carefully edited volume demonstrates why it is no accident that many of today’s evolutionary biologists continue to be fascinated by this beautiful fish. Anumber of the chapters in the book rep resent the distilled wisdom of researchers who have spent years exploring the intricacies of stickleback biology.BillRowland,for instance, significantly advances our understanding of the reproductive behaviour of C. aculeatus, and Bob Wootton investigates how energy allocation influences reproductive success. Though much has already been discovered about the stickleback, one of the books strengths is the emphasis on the intriguingpuzzles that are, as yet, unresolved. The threespine stickleback occurs in both freshwater and marine habitats on the margins of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in the Northern Hemisphere. Fossil evidence and current evolutionary analyses suggest that the marine stickleback is the ancestral form and that there have been repeated colonizations of freshwater habitats. The chapters in the book document striking morphological and behavioural variation among populations. Much of this variation is clearly adaptive in origin. For instance, Thomas Reimchen provides compelling evidence that predators (of which there are at least 67 species, ranging from 0.3g backswimmers to 300kg fur seals) play an important role in stickleback evolution. Felicity Huntingford and her colleagues describe how whole suites of antipredator tactics are attuned to the local predation regime and reveal that subtle interactions between the stickleback father and his offspring produce behavioural responses entirely appropriate to the prevailing risk. Theo Bakker notes pro nounced population differences in stickleback aggression and draws on his own elegant behaviour genetics experiments to argue that selection has favoured increased aggressiveness in freshwater populations. Susan Foster suggests that variation in courtship behaviour can be linked to differences in cannabilistic behaviour among populations, and John Baker describes impressive variation in the life histories of female threespine sticklebacks. Pronounced variation in armour (dorsal spines and lateral plates) and coloration is also evident. Distinct forms of stickleback can occur at the same site. For instance, certain rivers support both anadromous and stream-resident sticklebacks. In other locations, divergent lake and stream populations coexist where rivers enter, or exit from, lakes. Finally, there can even be two distinct morphs of G. aculeatus in the same lake; one specializing on plankton, the other on benthic prey. 112

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Such impressive differentiation provides seemingly unassailable evidence for the power of natural selection. Nonetheless, as J.D. McPhail notes, a paradox remains. Although the Gasterosteus lineage has been present since at least the Miocene, it is represented by just two, long-established species, the widely distributed G. aculeatus and the much more localized C. wheatkmdi. If the G. aculeatus species complex is undergoing rapid speciation, as the pronounced population divergence would seem to indicate, why is the genus so species-poor? Part of this can be attributed to the fact that many populations are recent, having been established since the last major glaciation. This, however, cannot be the entire answer, since other groups of fish (most notably certain cichlids) have become speciose in a short period of time and, in any case, the ice sheets did not extend across the entire stickleback range. McPhailsuggests that the threespine stickleback is an excellent colonizer but a poor competitor, and that iso lated populations in ephemeral habitats are extremely vulnerable to extinction. In their closing chapter, Foster and Bell favour the view that the species has limited potential for specialization in the use of food and other resources. How can such limitations be reconciled with an undisputed facility for divergence? The resolution of this paradox willsignificantly advance our understanding of speciation. I do not have the space to identify the many highlights of this excellent book, but cannot conclude without saying that the editors are to be congratulated for producing a volume in which the writing is of a uniformly high standard and where the sections are well-integrated and cross-referenced. I recommend it not only to stickleback enthusiasts but also to anyone who enjoys the intellectual challenge of solving the enigmas of the evolutionary process. Anne Magurran Dept of Zoology,

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK OX1 3PS

In honour of T.W.Fline Communicating in Science; 2nd edn by Vernon Booth

Cambridge University Press, 1993. f9.95 pbk (xiv + 78 pages) ISBN0 521 42915 3 in science is undeniably as important C as finding something to communicate. Yet, ommunicating your findings effectively

there is a surprising paucity of courses or seminars that teach students how to cruise effectively through the meanders of lecture delivery, thesis writing and manuscript preparation, Oddly, no such paucity is to be found on library shelves: the number of books and articles on scientific writing is astronomical, especially if we include the more general literature on the proper use of the English language, books for editors (did you know they existed?), dictionaries, thesauruses and various compilations of units of measurement and nomenclature. So, was there a niche available for yet another booklet on communication in science? As always happens under very competitive conditions, the key is in reinventing the niche and adopting some aspect or point of view that has been poorly exploited by others. Vernon Booth has succeeded well in this task with this second edition of Communicating in Science. Unfortunately though, this success will not be seen by its creator, as the second edition comes out a couple of years after his death. The first appealing attribute of Booth’s opus is that it has the kind of short, innocent appearance, with only 78 pages, which allowed me to overcome my laziness, pick it up and glance through it. There are eight chap ters, some of which are necessary and expected components of this type of literature: ‘Writing a scientific paper’; ‘Preparation of the script’; and ‘Preparation of a doctoral dissertation’. However, looking further, other entries reveal the author’s typically British sense of humour and peculiar point of view: ‘before you lecture us, please read this’, or ‘an appeal to North Americans’. I was particularly struck by the dedication of the book: ‘to T.W. Fline’, which stands for Those Whose First Language Is Not English! Being one of the thousands of T.W. Flines in the biological sciences, 1could not resist the temptation to go on reading. Ifyou are an experienced scientific writer (or talker), you should have incorporated most of Booth’s suggestions in an easy-toaccess subroutine in your brain. That being the case, the book becomes a pleasurable series of reminders, punctuated by humorous spikes. One of these is Booth’s explanation of what you should do when you read a letter starting with the three saddest words: ‘The Editor regrets...‘. If you are a newcomer to the fascinating and intriguing world of how to best sell your work, then the tips collected by Booth are gems that you want to memorize and put to work for you as soon as possible. The ‘appeal to North Americans’ is a delicious piece that could not have come from anyone but a British writer, the underlying idea of the chapter being that there is but one English language, notwithstanding the theories of modern TREE

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BOOK linguistics about language evolution. Booth considers the American scientists as the coheirs of the English lingo, and therefore deems them co-responsible for its proper use and propagation. The chapter is filled with pleas to avoid complex, clumsy, longwinded adjectival phrases (like this one), to ban americanizations (that is, creating new words by adding -ization at the end), and to caution on the use and misuse of homonyms (although sometimes Booth goes too far: a manuscript is, technically speaking, something that has been written by hand, as opposed to a computerscript or a typescript!). Finally, what about our beloved T.W. Fline? This chapter is a mere four pages long, but I could easily recognize my own frequent mistakes (and some of my editors’ complaints) in every single printed line! Examples are endless: one is the use of words that are nonexistent, that are simply what you think is the English translation of a term in your native language. Another common mistake is the unwarranted presence of idiomatic English (like mice ‘being’ injected.. .). Spelling and pronunciation problems are also a major source of editorial grievance, although even some native speakers are not exempt from them, as some US political fig ure has recently unwittingly demonstrated. All of this is kindly tempered by the conclusion of the chapter, which reads ‘For your comfort 1may add that English people, too, find it difficult to write good English’. So, maybe we can all profit from reading

Communicatingin Science. Massimo Pigliucci Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Box-43, 75 North Eagleville Road, Storrs, CT 06269-3043, USA

Leaf and landscape Scaling Physiological Processes, Leaf to Globe edited by JR. Ehleringer and C.F Field Physiological Ecology Series, Academic Press, 1993. 6;56.00/$69.95 hbk (xv + 388 pages) 1SBN 0 12 233440 X hysiological plant ecology has traditionally focused on responses to the environment and their underlying mechanisms at the individual-leaf and -plant levels. To date, much effort has been concentrated on characterizing responses to extreme environments such as hot deserts, the arctic, and temperate and tropical alpine zones. In

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these types of environments, spectacular adaptations to important stresses, such as lack of water and freezing temperatures, have been described. Recently, subtle adaptations to less-stressful but potentially more-complex environments, such as lowland tropical rainforests, have also been unveiled. The use of techniques more commonly associated with cellular, biochemical and molecular studies is common in physiological ecology today. These high-resolution approaches help provide mechanistic explanations of observed whole-plant phenomena. Physiological ecology has a more synthetic aspect as well. This aspect is concerned with identifying consequences of biochemical, physiological and morphological attributes at the population, ecosystem and larger scales, Successes in this direction have been few, largely because of the difficulty of scaling-up processes at the individual-leaf and -plant level to populations and communities. The urgency of understanding the potential impacts of global changes, such as climatic warming, atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment and stratospheric ozone depletion, has placed ecologists under increasing pressure to provide reasonable predictions of responses at the ecosystem and larger scales,

Scaling Physiological Processes, Leaf to Globerepresents an important contribution to this end. The book is divided into five major sections. The first section is on the integration of spatial patterns; Levin discusses general concepts of scale at the local level, and Schimel et al. analyse the lessons learned from FlFE, a large scale study of eco logical processes encompassing leaf- to landscape-level components. The second major section covers techniques and strategies for scaling processes described at the leaf level to infer characteristics at the canopy level. The so called ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ models are discussed in detail; in particular, Running and Hunt explain the scaling lessons learned in the development of their forestecosystem model over the past several years. The third section deals mainly with the dynamics of processes at the regional and global scales. In separate chapters, Vitousek, Tans, and Jarvis and Dewar discuss constraints in describing global circulation of different elements, particularly carbon. In the final chapter of this section, Caldwell et al. present a very interesting series of guidelines to be considered when addressing issues of scale. The fourth section is perhaps not directly related to issues encountered when moving across large differences in scale. Nevertheless, it is very relevant in that it reflects the viewpoint of many ecologists who react with some alarm to the development of global models that ignore the enormous complexity of ecosystem processes. In particular, the chapter

REVIEWS

by Chapin, and the discussion by Dawson and Chapin assess the merits of grouping species into guilds based on morphological and functional characters. The last section focuses on techniques, mainly stable-isotope analyses, remote sensing and canopy-flux measurements that are redefining our ability to scale across levels between the leaf and the globe. The excellent chapter by Yakir Berry et a/. highlights the versatility of still underexploited stable-isotope techniques for integrating processes from the sub-leaf to the global scale. As pointed out in the book, processes and their controlling factors that appear to be important at one scale often do not appear to be important at another scale. For example, a linear response of evapotranspiration to net radiation at the scale of the stand. or larger, may conceal finely tuned stomata1 responses to covarying environmental factors (e.g. light and vapour pressure deficit) with offsetting effects on stomata1 aperture. This could lead to incompatible conclusions between researchers who are working exclusively at different scales, for example concerning the role of stomata in controlling transpiration. Conflicting interpretations derived from observations at different scales cannot be reconciled unless the influence of scale is dealt with explicitly. This requires concurrent measurements at more than one scale of observation. Regardless of the accuracy of models in predicting responses at a single scale or even across scales, much detail about the mechanisms underlying the responses may be sacrificed without concurrent observations at multiple scales. These important issues may not have been given enough emphasis in this book. This book fills an important gap by summarizing the state of knowledge concerning strategies and techniques utilized in scaling between different levels of observation. It is also very effective in illustrating the complexity of the task of transferring information from one scale to the next. The wide subjects of discussion reflect the variety of approaches and the problems inherent in a field in which paradigms and models are still evolving. This volume will serve as a major reference for researchers and for graduate students interested in global eco logical issues, and will provide a conceptual framework for those concerned with the daunting methodological task of extrapolating in time or space, from one scale to another. G. Goldstein Dept of Botany, Umverslty of Hawaii, 3190 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA

F.C. Meinzer Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association. PO Box 1057. Aiea, HI 96701, USA

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