Small Americans

Even though spiders creep Belle Waring out, she's game enough to link to a wee article in the New York Times about Norm Platnick, the doyen of spider systematics. Platnick is something of a BSD of the wider systematics world, actually: a founder of the Willi Hennig Society and member of the editorial board of Cladistics, he has had the honour of being savaged by Richard Dawkins (in The Blind Watchmaker) for being an insufficiently orthodox neo-Darwinian.

I left a comment at Belle's, of course, but have been told it is 'awaiting moderation', perhaps because I included a sales pitch for herbal viagra. While we wait for a CT moderator to happen along, let me tell you about a very nice book I have just received, the second cool spider-related thing to happen today. This would be Spiders of North America: An Identification Manual, edited by Darrell Ubick et al.

SoNA is a dichotomous key. That is, it helps you to identify an animal by making you walk down a road that forks repeatedly. At each forking, the key asks you whether or not your specimen has a given character. If yes, you branch off and follow further, ever narrower side-roads until you reach your destination, the identity of the animal. If no, you keep along the main road till you hit a forking that takes you off it. If there was a general key to all the spiders of Canada and the continental USA before SoNA, I do not know of it.

To European arachnologists, SoNA will sound (mutatis mutandis) a lot like Heimer & Nentwig's Spinnen Mitteleuropas, which was the standard key in this part of the world before it wandered out of print and into cyberspace (the successor to the old book is entirely online). SoNA offers something analogous to our comrades across the water. Unlike Heimer & Nentwig, alas, SoNA keys down only to generic level (though it does contain an extensive bibliography of guides to specific determination). It is superior to its European cousin in one important way, though. SoNA is chock full of beautiful diagnostic illustrations, most of them by Nadine Dupérré -- you can see a sample here. Unlike what you see in that sample, most of the illustrations in an arachnological key (and certainly the most important ones) are detailed pictures of tiny anatomical featuress (in most cases, not to put too fine a point on it, genitals). The illustrations in Heimer & Nentwig span a broad range of quality, with one end of that range being 'excellent' and the other end being, shall we say, something else. The illustrations in SoNA are uniformly excellent.

SoNA also contains lots of ancillary material. It's worth mentioning two bits specifically: an essay on spider phylogeny and classification by the Smithsonian's Jonathan Coddington, and an etymological guide to spiders' Linnaean binomial nomenclature (a must for these sad decadent times, in which schoolchildren are no longer universally force-fed Latin and Greek).

Spiders of North America will make a fab Christmas present for the arachnologist in your life. You can order it online from its publisher, the American Arachnological Society. Discounts if you belong to the club; you might also be able to cut yourself a good deal if you band together with others for a big mass order. That's what we did, 'we' in this case being people from the Arachnologische Gesellschaft eV (kudos to AraGes's entrepreneurial Martin Kreuels, BTW, for overcoming the collective action problem).