Dragonflies: Behaviour and Ecology of Odonata

  • Philip S. Corbet
Harley: 1999. 882pp £62.50

Dragonflies have almost certainly been using the same habitats in the same way for more than 250 million years. But, despite the general conservatism in this insect order, there is considerable variation in many aspects of their larval and adult behaviour, much of which is influenced by ecology. Philip Corbet's book is a rare beast: a truly authoritative natural history monograph dealing with a large taxon, and not strictly the behavioural ecology text that the title suggests.

Almost 20 years ago, as a student, I heard a rumour that Corbet, the patriarch of odonatologists, was about to write a new book. As the years passed, expectations grew, but later turned into concern that perhaps the work would not be finished. Key contributors to the material and impetus for the book passed away while it was in utero, including the extraordinary Peter Miller, whose research contributes something to every chapter. Not surprisingly, when the book eventually appeared, there was concern that it would not live up to 18 years of anticipation. But it did. Every aspect of biology touched upon is explained clearly and carefully by an author who has truly made the effort to understand it all.

Corbet has synthesized a phenomenal amount of material. He deliberately does not organize the book around the currently important questions in evolutionary ecology. Instead he has written a cleverly cross-referenced and indexed text that provides all the raw material from which ideas can be developed, or key information sought. The value in this approach is that, as current questions are replaced, the book will still provide well-organized information.

The book follows the sequence of the key life-history stages, starting with eggs, moving through larval behaviour and life-history traits, then dealing with emergence, pre-adult development and, in the largest chapter, reproduction. This is the most complete synthesis of behavioural, ecological and background material from a single taxonomic group I have ever seen. As though it were not enough to synthesize so much information, Corbet has also provided a large set of appendices giving valuable follow-up material from each chapter.

Corbet never pulls his linguistic punches, and uses strictly correct entomological terms throughout. This is initially daunting (as is the uncompromising use of binomial nomenclature), but the reasoning behind it is important: these terms are increasingly falling into disuse as well as misuse. The glossary at the end is invaluable.

I have only two quibbles. First, most of the figures are directly reproduced from their original sources, which means sometimes there is a hotchpotch of illustrative styles that does not always do justice to the text. Second, an illustrated key of the major taxa would have been a useful foil to the abundance of binomial names. But these criticisms are pebbles, thrown at an edifice that will sit next to Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson's The Ants (Springer, 1990) as one of the definitive natural history texts of the twentieth century.