© 2002 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Advances in Insect Physiology Volume 28
1 Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195
Advances in Insect Physiology Volume 28. P.D. Evans, ed. Academic Press, London. 2001, 339 pp., subject index (hard cover, ISBN 0-12-024228-1 $109.95).
The most recent volume of a distinguished series initiated by V.B. Wigglesworth, continues the remarkable record of achievement in bringing insects to the frontiers of physiology and development. The reviews are detailed and intended for the specialist but they can be read to gain a sense of the state of the art.
That is especially true of the review by Dow and Davies on the Malpighian tubules of Drosophila, a system little studied when volume 1 was published in 1963, but now known intimately. They bring home the value of the Drosophila Malpighian tubule as a model for developmental and physiological studies based on a rich genetic background. The facts are well marshaled but the text suffers from lax editing and proofreading.
Meinertzhagen addresses an issue of great historical interest in critically reviewing the phenomenon of plasticity in the insect nervous system. His review deals a decisive blow at the prevailing prejudice concerning the relevance of insects to "real" (i.e., vertebrate) nervous systems by demonstrating a wide range of plasticity during development, and on shorter time scales from diurnal to seasonal. The value of these simpler systems for the analysis of neuronal interactions comes out clearly.
The pairing of two further reviews of insect neurobiology make this volume a valuable resource to the neuroscientist. The remarkable and spectacularly complex unpaired median neurons, modulators of muscle activity, are reviewed by Brauning and Pfluger, while Orchard, Lange and Bendena survey FMRFamide-related peptides of insects. These two chapters would make a book in themselves.
A more specialized review of neutral amino acid absorption in lepidopteran midgut by Sacchi et al. completes this excellent volume.
As is usual for this series, the book is well produced, with the curious exception of the one color page that is relevant to two reviews but seemingly randomly inserted to the references of one of them. And the price, for 339 pages and one page of color is surely outrageous.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||