Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on October 17, 2007
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2007 47(6):896; doi:10.1093/icb/icm095
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Book Review |
Evolutionary Ecology of Parasites. Robert Poulin.
Department of Biology, Meredith College, Raleigh
NC 27607, USA
Correspondence: E-mail: grimesl{at}meredith.edu
Evolutionary Ecology of Parasites. Robert Poulin.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. 342 pp. ISBN13: 978-0-691-12085-0 (paper) $39.50, ISBN13: 978-0-691-12084-3 (cloth) $99.50.
Robert Poulin has produced a readable and useful textbook for those intensely interested in animal parasitology. It is definitely a scholarly work designed for the specialist. I would recommend it for graduate level courses in the advanced study of the evolution and ecology of parasites. However, equally important, it makes a handy reference for those actively involved in parasitological research. The author searches for trends and relationships in the evolutionary ecology of parasites using a comparative analytical methodology to investigate the current literature. This sweeping approach is designed to stimulate dynamic research seeking to answer the larger questions of parasite biology, which cross taxonomic lines.
The review is primarily concerned with metazoan parasites but does make fair use of selected protoctistans. The diversity of examples is broad enough, including microsporidians, apicomplexans, crustaceans, digeneans, monogeneans, nematodes, and acanthocephalans. Unfortunately, parasitic insects are notably absent. Overall, the parasites are the main players in this review with the host portrayed as the environmental background.
The synthetic approach of this book probes the overarching and interconnecting themes of parasite origins, host specificity, communities and population structure, life history strategies, exploitation strategies, parasite interactions, and parasite aggregation. Major topics are carefully provided with the appropriate number of figures and diagrams that improve clarity and support for the textual descriptions without cluttering the text. Many figures, particularly those in the origin chapter, creatively illustrate their points. The extensive bibliography of 50 pages would well serve anyone involved in research or the teaching of parasitology. Even though the index is adequate, it fails to separately list genera discussed within the body of the text.
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