The Identification of Worker Castes of Termite Genera from Soils of Africa and the Middle East - Hardcover

Sands, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0851992250 ISBN 13: 9780851992259

Publisher: CABI Publishing, 1998

Synopsis

The first step in devising any control measure for a pest is to ensure that it is correctly identified. This is notoriously difficult with termites, a group of social insects whose abundance and diversity in tropical soils endow them with profound economic and environmental significance. Termites associated with agricultural and forestry crops in developing countries have until now only been identifiable by features found in their soldier and adult castes, both of which are commonly absent from the foraging and infesting populations, which themselves consist almost entirely of worker castes. Until Dr Sands’ pioneering studies, there were no keys to identify these workers, and it was impossible to determine which termites in an apparent infestation were pests needing to be controlled and which were harmless scavengers. As a result, control measures were often applied indiscriminately, with wasteful and environmentally undesirable applications of insecticides. This book provides a key to the worker castes of all the genera of termites found in soils from Africa and the Middle East, together with a full set of detailed descriptions, accompanied by illustrations of their most important features. As a result, anyone with a working knowledge of insect anatomy will be able to identify termites found associated with crop damage. The book will thus be essential for workers in crop protection and entomology.

About this title

Review

"The main goal of this book is to enable those involved in the control of agricultural pests or in basic research on soil fauna to identify termite series that consist solely of workers. . . . Because termite workers have a rather uniform external appearance, the identification of 129 different morphs inevitably rests on a deep knowledge of their anatomy. The result is a long list of often multistate characters . . . Character state assessment is often difficult because it requires delicate observations or dissections, but the author provides reader-friendly instructions to carry out manipulations properly . . . The 36-page key is very detailed . . . Identifications can be checked with the help of detailed descriptions in words, supported by more than 1700 good-quality drawings and photographs . . . It should find a place on the shelves of every group interested in the identification of termites from this area, or in higher-level isopteran systematics."--The Quarterly Review of Biology

Edition details

• Publisher: CABI Publishing
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0851992250
• ISBN 13: 9780851992259
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512