Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Finally, a guide to the herps of NY!

Since the age of fourteen, I've yearned for a comprehensive modern field guide to the herpetofauna of my home state. Six of the state's most distinguished herpetologist have now teamed to fill this void with "The Amphibians and Reptiles of New York State: Identification, Natural History, and Conservation". I hope to offer my comments in this book in a few parts, starting today with the introductory material through the salamanders.

Because I'm so grateful for the effort the authors devoted to this impressive volume, I'll start with the positives. First, this book is well-written and a joy to read (I just breezed through the first 100+ pages over a cup of coffee). Another strength lies in the detailed accounting of each species' natural history and conservation status. Information on where to find each species (both regionally and locally) and basic information on reproduction and diet are offered for each species. In some cases, the natural history lessons extend to the photographs; see, for example, the Plate 3c of the early Spring breeding Jefferson's salamander dispersing over snow.

This said, I feel compelled to point out a few disappointing shortcomings. The first is a lack of a key, or even a set of figures that illustrate diagnostic traits. Important traits like the light line from the eye to the corner of the mouth in Desmognathus, for example, is seen only in a whole body shot of D. ochrophaeus in Plate 10c. A labeled close-up of this and other traits would prove invaluable to those who are just beginning to learn the fauna. A lack of detail on the identification of larval forms is particularly striking. Unfortunately, I'm left to conclude that his book falls a bit short on the "Identification" portion of the subtitle. In many cases, Conant and Collins' guide to the herps of the eastern US (part of the R.T. Peterson series) will prove to be a more valuable reference for species identification.

For those who are already well versed in the identification of New York's herps, however, the maps may be a bigger disappointment. Although they are based on a impressive public effort to develop an atlas of NY herps that extended form 1990 to 1999 and included more than 59,000 records, the maps are often lacking important details. For example, many species of salamanders appear to be absent from the Great Lakes plain and St. Lawrence Valley, but this is only occasionally illustrated. This pattern is noted, for example, in A. jeffersonianum, but not illustrated in the map. The absence of northern duskies from this area is illustrated, but their noted absence from higher altitudes in the Adirondacks is not. Simply put, the shaded maps in this volume don't do justice to the subtleties of many species' distributions. We need dot maps!

On a personal level, I also found the lack of evolutionary and phylogenetic information disappointing. Although this complaint stems in part from my own interests and may seem unjustified in a regional guide, the exclusion of this perspective deprives readers of information on the biogeography history of New York's herps, as well as information on the evolution of their natural histories. Readers would surely be interested to know that the closest relatives of our hellbenders are the remarkable giant salamanders of China and Japan. By noting the position of this species on the salamander tree of life would also inform readers about why this is our state's only native salamander with external fertilization.

More tomorrow...

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