Britain’s Spiders: A Field Guide
Britain’s Spiders: A Field Guide
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英国的蜘蛛：实地指南
DOI：
10.1093/ae/tmx063
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发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Eleanor Spicer Rice
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Eleanor Spicer Rice
昆虫学家，你可能会质疑4,000英里外大陆上蜘蛛指南的相关性。除此之外，蜘蛛学通常被视为昆虫学的秘密私生子，通常（但不总是）被家庭接受，然后只是作为一个局外人。因此，蜘蛛学家似乎可以挂在昆虫学的边缘，就像他们研究的蜘蛛一样，尽管它们无处不在，却没有被注意到。英国的蜘蛛可以改变这一点，或者至少可以，如果人们注意到它的话。这本精致、方便的野外指南，虽然在分布上只针对英国，但在整个池塘里都很好地阐明了昆虫学这位鲜为人知的表亲复杂而往往神秘的工作原理，而且它做得非常迷人和出色。这本书结合了生态顾问和博物学家劳伦斯·比（Lawrence Bee）的领域专业知识;杰夫·牛津（Geoff Oxford），约克大学的教职员工;和海伦·史密斯（Helen Smith），一位特别喜欢保护沼泽筏蜘蛛（Dolomedes plantarius）的生态学家。这三个假设的结果是准确而又容易获得的信息，从蜘蛛的性别到英国每个家庭的物种数量。它的实用性适用于地球仪上任何对蜘蛛感兴趣的人。此外，许多在英国很明显的蜘蛛科（和物种）也在美国结网。照片主导了文本，它们很漂亮，也很有用。到目前为止，我不知道蜘蛛领域指南是完整的和易于使用的。它甚至有令人难以置信的物种分布图，植根于英国蜘蛛学会蜘蛛记录计划数据库中的100多万条记录。从翻阅它的页面中获得的乐趣类似于观看烹饪节目，而不是真正准备菜肴。这是令人愉快的，你会学到一些东西，即使你从来没有做饭，或者在这种情况下，去英国猎蜘蛛。这本书的前半部分是非常翔实的，将成为一个优秀的独立初级萌芽蜘蛛爱好者。它包括一个图解说明的词汇表以及详细的收集技术，包括你可以在家里建立的工具。（我立刻做了一个“spi-pot”，一个用那些小咖啡杯和塑料包装制成的观察节肢动物的装置，想知道它在我的生活中一直在哪里。整本书包括蜘蛛识别基础知识的图像饱和部分，如形态学，产丝，网和卵囊。它提供了关于如何找到蜘蛛并利用这些信息来识别它们的令人愉快的花絮（“在这个国家的什么地方发现蜘蛛对于缩小它可能是哪个物种也很重要”）。我特别喜欢他们的收集技巧，“四处挖掘”，作者告诉我们要用手和膝盖跪下来，透过草地看。
Entomologist, you may question the relevance of a guide to spiders on a continent 4,000 miles away. Added to this, arachnology is often seen as the secret love child of entomology, usually (but not always) accepted in the family, and then only as an outsider. As a result, arachnologists can seem to hang on entomology’s edges, much like the spiders they study, unnoticed despite their ubiquity. Britain’s Spiders can change that, or at least it could, if people paid attention to it. This exquisite, handy field guide, though British-specific in distribution, works well across the pond to elucidate the complex and often secretive workings of entomology’s little-noticed cousin, and it does so charmingly and well. The book combines the field expertise of Lawrence Bee, an ecological consultant and naturalist; Geoff Oxford, a faculty member at the University of York; and Helen Smith, an ecologist who has a particular fondness for conserving the fen raft spider (Dolomedes plantarius). The result of this academia-meets-realworld trifecta is accurate yet accessible information on everything from spider sex to the number of species per family evident in Britain. Its utility applies to anyone across the globe with a general spider interest. Besides, many spider families (and species) evident in Britain also spin their webs in America. Photographs dominate the text, and they’re beautiful and useful. To date, I don’t know of a spider field guide as complete and easy to use. It even has mind-boggling species distribution maps, rooted in the more than 1 million records in the British Arachnological Society’s Spider Recording Scheme database. The pleasure derived from flipping through its pages is akin to watching a cooking show with no intent of actually making the dishes prepared. It’s pleasant and you learn something, even if you never cook the meal or, in this case, go spider hunting in Britain.The first half of the book is remarkably informative and would make an excellent stand-alone primer for budding spider enthusiasts. It includes a photographically illustrated glossary as well as detailed collecting techniques, including tools you can build at home.(I immediately built the “spi-pot,” an arthropod-observing contraption constructed from those tiny coffee creamer cups and plastic wrap, and wondered where it had been all my life.) The entire book includes image-saturated sections on spider identification basics such as morphology, silk production, webs, and egg sacs. It provides delightful tidbits on how to find spiders and use that information to identify them (“where in the country a spider is found is also important in narrowing down which species it might be”). I am especially fond of their collecting technique,“grubbing about,” wherein the authors tell us to get down on our hands and knees and look through the grass.