An introduction to entomology; or, Elements of the natural history of insects

Kirby, William; Spence, William

doi:10.5962/bhl.title.152792

Cited by 33 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…Almost two centuries ago, Kirby and Spence (1826) noted that tropical species of an insect genus usually exceed those of colder climates in size. More quantitatively, May (1978) estimated, based on the study of Schoener and Janzen (1968), that the mean body length of species from five insect orders is approximately 1.5‐fold larger in the tropics than in the temperate zone.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temperature‐associated upper limits to body size in terrestrial poikilotherms

Makarieva¹,

Gorshkov²,

2005

Oikos

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We show that the largest tropical species of terrestrial poikilotherms from 25 taxa exceed, in linear body size, the largest representatives of the same taxa from the temperate (e.g. Great Britain) and polar (e.g. Wrangel Island) zones by 3.2 and 5.7 times, respectively. Here we develop a theoretical approach which quantitatively explains the observed body size patterns and relates them to ambient temperature under the assumption that there exists a temperature‐independent critical minimum value of mass‐specific metabolic rate bmin, a fall below which is incompatible with successful biological performance. This value sets an upper limit to linear body size within a taxon. Mass‐specific metabolic rate decreases with increasing body size but, in poikilotherms, grows exponentially with ambient temperature. Such compensation of the size‐related drop in mass‐specific metabolic rate b by higher ambient temperature extends the permitted range of body sizes for which b≥bmin. As a result, the maximum linear body size grows approximately twofold per each ten degrees of increase in ambient temperature. We also discuss why this prediction does not apply to interspecific comparisons of aquatic poikilotherms, for which an opposite trend is to be expected. We quantify in theory the maximum body size patterns recently reported for benthic gammaridean amphipods.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temperature‐associated upper limits to body size in terrestrial poikilotherms

Makarieva¹,

Gorshkov²,

2005

Oikos

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“…Although these statements are consistent with the life‐time commitment principle at colony founding, these early authors also implicitly assumed, as Darwin must have done ( cf . Kirby & Spence, ), that all social insect queens are singly inseminated, because multiple mating in the honeybee was first documented about a decade later (Roberts, ). However, when scrutinizing these quotes, their logic never appears to depend critically on maximal offspring relatedness being maintained after superorganismality evolved, so multiple queen mating appears to have become a distraction until it was realized that, at least in its obligate form, it is an evolutionarily derived superorganismal trait (Boomsma, , , ; Hughes et al ., ).…”

Section: Resolving the Terminological Quagmire Facilitates Evolutionamentioning

confidence: 99%

Superorganismality and caste differentiation as points of no return: how the major evolutionary transitions were lost in translation

2017

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More than a century ago, William Morton Wheeler proposed that social insect colonies can be regarded as superorganisms when they have morphologically differentiated reproductive and nursing castes that are analogous to the metazoan germ-line and soma. Following the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s, Wheeler's insights were largely neglected, and we were left with multiple new superorganism concepts that are mutually inconsistent and uninformative on how superorganismality originated. These difficulties can be traced to the broadened sociobiological concept of eusociality, which denies that physical queen-worker caste differentiation is a universal hallmark of superorganismal colonies. Unlike early evolutionary naturalists and geneticists such as Weismann, Huxley, Fisher and Haldane, who set out to explain the acquisition of an unmated worker caste, the goal of sociobiology was to understand the evolution of eusociality, a broad-brush convenience category that covers most forms of cooperative breeding. By lumping a diverse spectrum of social systems into a single category, and drawing attention away from the evolution of distinct quantifiable traits, the sociobiological tradition has impeded straightforward connections between inclusive fitness theory and the major evolutionary transitions paradigm for understanding irreversible shifts to higher organizational complexity. We evaluate the history by which these inconsistencies accumulated, develop a common-cause approach for understanding the origins of all major transitions in eukaryote hierarchical complexity, and use Hamilton's rule to argue that they are directly comparable. We show that only Wheeler's original definition of superorganismality can be unambiguously linked to irreversible evolutionary transitions from context-dependent reproductive altruism to unconditional differentiation of permanently unmated castes in the ants, corbiculate bees, vespine wasps and higher termites. We argue that strictly monogamous parents were a necessary, albeit not sufficient condition for all transitions to superorganismality, analogous to single-zygote bottlenecking being a necessary but not sufficient condition for the convergent origins of complex soma across multicellular eukaryotes. We infer that conflict reduction was not a necessary condition for the origin of any of these major transitions, and conclude that controversies over the status of inclusive fitness theory primarily emanate from the arbitrarily defined sociobiological concepts of superorganismality and eusociality, not from the theory itself.

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“…The most popular subjects for animal behavior studies were vertebrates, but insects ran a close second. The very popular illustrated Introduction to Entomology (4 volumes, ) by William Kirby (1759–1850) and William Spence (1783–1859) has been discussed previously (Egerton :185–186, :36–38), and here the focus is on their natural history studies. Five of their chapters describe injuries which insects cause to humans and crops, two chapters are on insect benefits, and 18 chapters are on various aspects of behavior.…”

Section: Natural Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 56: Ethology until 1973

Egerton

2016

Bulletin Ecologic Soc America

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An introduction to entomology; or, Elements of the natural history of insects

Cited by 33 publications

References 0 publications

Temperature‐associated upper limits to body size in terrestrial poikilotherms

Temperature‐associated upper limits to body size in terrestrial poikilotherms

Superorganismality and caste differentiation as points of no return: how the major evolutionary transitions were lost in translation

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 56: Ethology until 1973

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