Asked to name an insect society, most of us—whether casual or professional students of nature—quickly point to one of the so-called eusocial marvels: the ant colony, the beehive, the termite mound, the wasp nest. Each is awe-inspiring in its division of labor—collective defense, foraging, and nestbuilding. Yet E. O. Wilson cautioned back in 1971 that sociality should be defined more broadly, "in order to prevent the arbitrary exclusion of many interesting phenomena." Thirty-five years later, James T. Costa gives those interesting phenomena their due. He argues that, in trying to solve the puzzle of how highly eusocial behaviors evolved in a few insect orders, evolutionary biologists have neglected the more diverse social arrangements in the remaining twenty-eight orders—insect societies that don't fit the eusocial schema. Costa synthesizes here for the first time the scattered literature about social phenomena across the arthropod phylum: beetles and bugs, caterpillars and cockroaches, mantids and membracids, sawflies and spiders. This wide-ranging tour takes a rich narrative approach that interweaves theory and data analysis with the behavior and ecology of these remarkable groups. This comprehensive treatment is likely to inspire a new generation of naturalists to take a closer look.
James T. Costa is Executive Director of Highlands Biological Station and Professor of Biology at Western Carolina University.
Bert Hölldobler is the Robert A. Johnson Professor in Social Insect Research at Arizona State University. He was previously Professor of Biology and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and subsequently held the chair for Behavioral Physiology and Sociobiology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He is an elected member of many academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. He has received many awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for The Ants, coauthored with E. O. Wilson.
Edward O. Wilson was Pellegrino University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University. In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes (one of which he shares with Bert Hölldobler), Wilson has won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
This marvelously researched and comprehensive work fills a major gap in the literature on insect social behavior...Jim Costa has done this only as a seasoned entomologist could accomplish it, with a full account of each major taxonomic group in turn, including the contextual information needed to understand the significance of the social behavior its constituent species display...[He] routinely travels from taxonomy to anatomy, from physiology to ecology, and into broad issues of natural history to create in this book an overall mosaic of what the 'other' insect societies are and what they have achieved across hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
from Edward O. Wilson's Commentary on The Othe Societies
This marvelously researched and comprehensive work fills a major gap in the literature on insect social behavior...Jim Costa has done this only as a seasoned entomologist could accomplish it, with a full account of each major taxonomic group in turn, including the contextual information needed to understand the significance of the social behavior its constituent species display...[He] routinely travels from taxonomy to anatomy, from physiology to ecology, and into broad issues of natural history to create in this book an overall mosaic of what the 'other' insect societies are and what they have achieved across hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
Bernard Crespi
This book provides comprehensive, astoundingly thorough coverage of the 'minor' social insect groups, which have been neglected since Fabre brought the study of insect behavior to life over 100 years ago. The chapters make accessible for the first time a huge trove of obscure yet endlessly fascinating natural history, which should entertain as well as inspire future researchers to study its six-legged bestiary. I was especially pleased to see the historical treatments of issues and research topics, which put the fields and topics in perspective. The Other Insect Societies is a tremendously impressive piece of scholarship. — Bernard Crespi, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Simon Fraser University
