Elizabeth Gosling 2003

Bivalve Molluscs Biology, Ecology and Culture

Fishing news Books (Blackwells), Oxford. ISBN 0-85238-234-0. Hard covers, 443 pages. £75.00.

This is an ambitious book in which Elizabeth Gosling seeks to ‘do’ the bivalves. The aim is to cover almost everything that you could want to know about this class of molluscs. The opening chapters cover such general areas as an introduction to the bivalves and their place within the Mollusca, their morphology, ‘ecology’ which covers abiotic (such as temperature and salinity) and biotic (such as predators and competitors) factors which influence their distribution, feeding and digestion, reproduction, growth, respiration, circulation and osmoregulation. The second phase of the book tackles a variety of issues linked to the economic culture of bivalves, with chapters on fisheries, culture, the involvement of genetics in aquaculture, disease and parasites and issues of public health linked with the consumption of bivalves. Readers may prefer not to dip into this last chapter with a shellfish meal in front of them with its schedule of nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, seizures, coma and death that may ensue after eating contaminated mussels!

Throughout the book the author concentrates on four ‘taxa’ of commercial importance. And so for each section, we learn sequentially how this relates to first mussels, then oysters, then clams (a rag bag of infaunal bivalves, chiefly veneroids but also including arcoids and myoids) and then scallops. I am not convinced that this always works very well and does seem to lead to a fair amount of repetition of information. In places there are overgeneralizations or mistakes. For example, is the crystalline style of all bivalves really 3 cm long? We are told that the calcareous part of the bivalve shell comprises an outer layer of prisms with middle and inner layers of nacre and yet of the four ‘taxa’ given special prominence in this book only one conforms to this description.

The book is very readable, in an easy style. It is well illustrated and there is a wealth of data and statistics presented. Little is taken for granted and so the text is certainly going to be accessible to the students that it seems to be targeting. Elizabeth Gosling is enviably well read – as evidenced by long reference lists which accompany each chapter. Her Preface indicates that in all over 1200 references are cited. Not all the chapters are equally up to date, for example the relationships of the bivalves within the molluscs is rather dated and many of the references cited for this chapter are rather elderly, but in most chapters readers will find a good introduction to the recent primary literature. The book is generally well produced, but there are a number of editing type glitches in the first chapter (for example inconsistencies in style) which don’t help with that vague feeling that perhaps this section was ‘tacked on’ afterwards. It is illustrated plentifully throughout. The black and white photographs are generally excellent, but the line drawings, largely redrawn from previous publications, are perhaps less well executed (but I am in no position whatsoever to be critical of anyone’s art). There are two indices, one by subject and the other systematic (at both generic and specific level). These are useful although the former could be usefully expanded to include more of the technical terms used in the book.

In short it is a good book. However, I think it falls short of the claims made for it on its covers (presumably by the publishers rather than its author). Here it is advertised as a ‘ landmark book that will stand for many years as the standard work on the subject’ [publisher’s italics] and a ‘comprehensive book covering all major aspects of this important class’. Whilst reading it I was very struck by the fact that I was really reading two books. The second part that concentrates on bivalves in aquaculture is excellent. This is preceded by a more general discussion of the biology of the Bivalvia where the author appears considerably less comfortable. The content jars rather with the title ‘Bivalve Molluscs’ because actually there is almost nothing written on any of the multitude of taxa that are not mussels, oysters, clams or scallops, indeed there is little to even hint at their existence. Those who dwell on freshwater bivalves will feel particularly bereft of attention. I know nothing at all about the genesis of this book, but it ‘feels’ like one more specialist account on bivalves in aquaculture that got expanded to meet a more general audience and market. One fascination of the Bivalvia, to me at least, is its rich diversity of different taxa and life habits and I was disappointed that a book marketed so blatantly as a ‘standard work’ should actually be rather narrowly focussed. To be sure, writing a general account of the Bivalvia would be a difficult task for a single author, in particular one which covers such a broad range of topics that span detailed anatomy to fishery tonnages. It is true that as the Treatise volumes (published in 1969 and 1971) grow older, their opening sections on such aspects as bivalve relationships, anatomy, physiology and ecology become progressively less useful and there was a notable ‘gap in the market’ for a more up to date general account of the Bivalvia. But in recent years two very useful volumes (Beesley et al. 1998 and Coan, Scott & Bernard, 2000) have nipped into the void. Although these are both accounts of the bivalve fauna of particular (large) geographic regions, they present any aspiring student or researcher with excellent accounts of the general biology of the class, followed in each case by very detailed sections on individual superfamilies and families (and in the case of Coan et al., genera and species).

These criticisms aside, this book is going to be invaluable to students of applied bivalve biology who wish to study aquaculture. It provides a good introduction to the ecology and biology of bivalves which are of major economic importance and, perhaps more importantly, a spring board into the primary literature.

Liz Harper, Cambridge

Beesley, P. L., G. J. B. Ross, & Wells, A., Eds. (1998). Mollusca. The Southern Synthesis. Volume 5 Part A. Melbourne, CSIRO Publishing.
Coan, E. V., P. Valentich Scott, & Bernard, F.R. Eds. (2000). Bivalve seashells of western North America. Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

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Marion Nizon and John Z Young 2003

The brains and lives of cephalopods

Oxford University Press, Oxford, 392pp. Hardback 0-19-852761-6, £75.

This book, with its focus on the brain, sensory systems and related behaviour of these highly evolved molluscs, stands as a landmark in the field. It represents the life's work of John Z Young and Marion Nixon. JZ, as he was known, was one of the most outstanding zoologists of the 20th century. He died in 1997 and the book was completed by Marion, who must be applauded for her efforts on this enormous task. Marion devoted her professional career to working with JZ and in the book she assembles the astonishing amount of data they gathered over a lifetime.

The book deals with all but three of the cephalopod families, two of which, the Walvisteuthidae and Psychroteuthidae, are monospecific or contain only a couple of species. The early chapters covering the nautilus, cuttlefish and loliginid squid, and a later chapter on the octopuses, contain the most detailed information on the brain and central nervous system and how these relate to the life-style of the living animals. All the chapters are superbly illustrated with examples of JZ's serial sections of brains, stained using Cajal's silver method. This technique provided the basis for much of the research which underpins the book (the slides, by the way, are now held as a single collection at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.).

This book is a mine of information and I have found myself going back and dipping into it again and again, continually being stimulated. It should find a place on the shelves of all serious students of the cephalopods and it will find a wider audience among malacologists and invertebrate zoologists generally who want to gain insight into the relationships between brain, behaviour, lifestyle and environment.

Paul G Rodhouse, British Antarctic Survey

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Martin A. Snyder 2003

Catalogue of the marine gastropod family Fasciolariidae.

Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Special Publication 21: 1-431. US$ 38.50 plus postage

Orders to: Scientific Publications Dept., Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103-1195, USA: www.acnatsci.org/library/scipubs

This massive work is a comprehensive critical catalogue of generic and specific names that have been applied to members of the marine neogastropod family Fasciolariidae including both living and fossil taxa. The first part of the volume (190 pages) consists of an alphabetical listing of the names with full bibliographic citations, as well as comments concerning their present status, distribution and geological age. The second part of the volume lists the names under major phylogenetic groups of Fasciolariidae. Finally, the enormous bibliography extends for 100 pages. This volume is the result of dogged and patient scholarship over many years and will form a major resource for taxonomic and phylogenetic studies on this large family of marine gastropods.

John Taylor, Natural History Museum

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Robert Cameron

Land Snails in the British Isles

Illustrated by Gordon Riley.

Field Studies Council AIDGAP series. Occasional Publication 79. ISBN 1 85153 890 9. 82 pp soft back with pictorial key to families, general key to families, annotated key to species by family and keys to internal characters. Cheque for £8.95 (incl. post and packing) payable to Field Studies Council to FSC Publications, Preston Montford, Shrewsbury, Shropshire SY4 1HW, or via www.field-studies-council.org/publications.

It is approaching 30 years since Cameron and Redfern published their key and guide to British land snails in the Linnean Society’s Synopsis of the British Fauna. There have been many changes in nomenclature, new species have been recognised and the appearance of this greatly improved guide is timely. Brief notes on biology, habitats, distribution, collection and preservation follow an informative introduction. The basis on which the systematic list was constructed is explained in concise detail and follows that in Kerney’s 1999 Atlas of the land and freshwater molluscs of Britain and Ireland. Importantly, synonyms are given for the somewhat different nomenclature followed in the checklist for the northern and central European land and freshwater CLECOM project. The adoption of a conservative family and higher-level classification is clearly sensible at a time when molecular biology in particular is rapidly changing our understanding of these relationships. Exotic species confined to greenhouses are excluded and the guide covers only land snails, excluding slugs.

There is clear illustrated guidance to where problems are likely to be encountered, such as the recognition of juveniles and how to deal with them, and the need to examine reproductive, dart and jaw anatomy in some difficult groups. The unresolved species status in Trichia is highlighted (page 68) but unfortunately the figure of the reproductive organs of Trichia hispida (page 78) fails to show the bursa (gametolytic sac) as being longer than it is wide. Trichia plebeia consistently exhibits a gametolytic sac as wide as it is long, whereas in other British Trichia it is longer than it is wide. Advice on using the keys is clear and informative and the short but critical points highlighted in the ‘before you start’ section are particularly valuable, as are the explanations and illustrations given in the glossary of terms and measurements.

A selection of Gordon Riley’s excellent coloured illustrations from Kerney and Cameron’s 1979 A field guide to the land snails of Britain and North-west Europe is very helpful and their use for more species and incorporation within the keys would be very desirable but would presumably have been too costly. Coloured figures of living snails can clearly show key features in species for which discrimination on shells alone might be difficult. The illustration showing the black mantle margin in Oxychilus helveticus is a good example of this, but the inexperienced are still likely to be confused by, for example, the mantle pigmentation showing through the shell but perhaps appearing to be shell pigmentation in living Monacha cantiana.

In holding the view that ‘keys never work well’, I belonged in the extreme group identified by Cameron. My main objection to keys is that they generally deal with characters in a long dichotomous process that too often gives the wrong result and the investigator is left with no useful information. However, this guide is different and escapes the dogma of entirely artificial keys. There is a separate key to families and then to species within families and all stages of the process are accompanied by clear and useful figures. Some debatable points are likely to surface: Aegopinella nitidula does possess very fine and distinctive spiral striae, but most importantly, the guide works. In the hands of both the experienced and inexperienced it came up with the right answer. A great deal of work has gone into developing and preparing this authoritative guide and it is highly recommended. There is still an urgent need for a comparable guide to slugs and an even more overdue guide to British non-marine aquatic species, the most recent of which was Macan’s 1949 Freshwater Biological Association key.

Fred Naggs, Natural History Museum, London

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Norman Macleod (Editor) and Project Team from The Natural History Museum, London 2003

PaleoBase: Macrofossils Part 2.0 Ammonoids, Bivalves, Coleoids, Gastropods and other Mollusca

Natural History Museum and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Issued as a CD-ROM.

This CD-rom is the second part in a projected series of three that is designed to form a fully relational database of invertebrate palaeontology. It is exclusively based on molluscs, with descriptions of some 318 genera comprising 83 gastropods, 82 ammonoids, 75 bivalves and correspondingly smaller numbers of the rarer molluscan groups. It is based on what are perceived to be common and stratigraphically important taxa, and is designed for use by undergraduate, amateur and professional palaeontologist alike.

Even if biostratigraphy is not exactly your forte, I would strongly urge you to look at some of the stunning images in this product. They are based, of course, on the Natural History Museum reference collections, and the various views (up to four for some taxa) and annotations provide an invaluable introduction to key molluscan groups. You can zoom in on the images, display them together, and then download them into a file for future reference. You can compare your taxodont bivalve with your heterodont, or show someone what a heteromorph ammonite or an octobranch is! This will be an invaluable teaching aid at the undergraduate level, but there is also enough detail here for it to be used by many molluscan research groups.

The heart of the database is the Taxon Record Panel for each genus. It is easy to navigate around this and find taxonomic authorities, full descriptions and remarks, and some brief notes on biogeography and ecology. I particularly liked the short summary of features in a morphological key and the link to a glossary of morphological terms. Some of these fields can be edited and saved directly into a Word file.

The various tools are easy to use and without too much difficulty you can interrogate the database for information on ecological habitat, biogeographic realm, chronostratigraphic range, author, year of publication, etc. It is by no means comprehensive but I saw it very much more as a way into molluscan palaeobiology rather than a comprehensive reference work. There are some 484 taxonomic references included in the pack and there is the facility to store record lists as separate files and read these lists back into the database.

Specialists will undoubtedly find some points of detail with which they disagree, or know of alternative specimens that they think are better. But as an overall guide and introduction to the study of fossil molluscs this is an excellent product that I can recommend without hesitation. To some extent it has been designed around the much-used undergraduate text-book “Invertebrate Palaeontology and Evolution” by E.N.K. Clarkson (Fourth Edition, 1998). Now the fossils described by Clarkson can be brought to life in the lecture hall and practical lab. I only hope that both staff and students don’t forget to look at the real things as well !

PaleoBase: Macrofossils Part 2 costs £27.50 (single user) and £130 (site licence). It can be obtained from Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

www.blackwellpublishing.com. You can also check: www.Paleobase.com

Alistair Crame, British Antarctic Survey