Book Review: Guide to the freshwater Crustacea of New Zealand by Chapman, Lewis and Winterbourn

Abstract

This bright and very attractive new book is a milestone of its kind and is a huge advance over its predecessor, the classic Introduction to the freshwater Crustacea of New Zealand by Chapman and Lewis (1976). The text and illustrations are masterfully arranged, making it a pleasure to open and read and much easier to use than the 1976 book. Although much of the text is new, it retains the distinctive style of the original---direct, very readable and always interesting, frank, honest, and often admitting to gaps in knowledge, which readers---amateur, student, and professional alike---are encouraged to discover and complete with their own studies. Similarly, the keys are new and re-written, are unambiguous, and are greatly facilitated by having the appropriate line drawings beside the text. Accounts of the Copepoda, Syncarida and Amphipoda, particularly, contain a large amount of new material, discovered in the past three decades. New information is included on the remarkable subterranean terrestrial crustacean fauna, virtually unknown in 1976. There are many new drawings, photographs, photomicrographs and figures. The vivid and fascinating coloured photographs of representative crustaceans on pages 22-27 depict living animals in colour, in their natural environments, and seem especially chosen to entice one into studying these creatures. Chapters 2 to 16, comprising the introduction, the orders of freshwater crustaceans (Anostraca and Notostraca, Spinicaudata, Cladocera, Ostracoda, Copepoda, Syncarida, Tanaidacea, Mysidae, Isopoda, Amphipoda, Caridea, Astacidea, Brachyura), crustacean communities, and specialised habitats, all have individual references at the ends of the chapters. Unlike the 1976 book, this work lacks the somewhat idiosyncratic chapter on aquatic arachnida (mites), which would be out of place in this work. Remarkably, the new book manages to get both more information and more illustrations into less space, with 73 fewer pages (the section on Arachnida ran to only 16 pages in the 1976 book). While the keys look simple and straightforward, animals in some orders are small, and parts will have to be dissected out and examined in glycerine on a microscope slide beneath a microscope before identification to species can be obtained. This however, is often the case with invertebrate identifications and will be taken for granted by all but the complete novice. Some of the crustaceans covered in this book are discovered routinely during field trips by entomologists, who will at last be able to identify them. This book can now guide speleologists, too, when they find distinctively white crustaceans. Having worked as a museum invertebrate zoologist for over three decades, I have seen a number of these species brought regularly by members of the public for identification---a task that will only now be rendered more likely to be possible.