micropolitics of defining terms of referencefor prizes are constantly in play — whowrites the review of potential candidates,and the jockeying in the committees and in the academy’s plenary meeting that influences the outcome of the process. Theacademy has been known to override com-mittee recommendations, and infighting,ignorance and fixation on pet ideas were perhaps more prevalent in the early days,when review procedures were less systematicand a few dominant personalities held sway.But Friedman shows how, even today, whenone looks behind the scenes the Nobel prizebelies the popular myth of being a dispas-sionate, neutral, disinterested process.

Friedman’s tale is never dull. Althoughnot intended as a scholarly work, the book isnot mere gossip. Aimed mainly at a broadaudience, it nevertheless has a separate section of elaborate notes for historians andstudents of the politics of science wishing todelve deeper. What irritates is the cuteness of some subheadings put in to engage thepopular reader. Also, with all the focus onconflicts and controversial events, one wonders what happens in the cases of morepeaceful convergence around prizewinningcandidates, or whether, in such an extraordi-nary setting, those don’t exist. ■

Aant Elzinga is in the Department of the History ofIdeas and Theory of Science,University ofGöteborg, SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden.

Sex appeal of amusical insectKatydids and Bush-Crickets:Reproductive Behavior andEvolution of the Tettigoniidaeby Darryl T. GwynneCornell University Press: 2001. 344 pp.$42.50

Marlene Zuk

With great reluctance, I have decided againstmy initial impulse to give this book to every-one I know for Christmas. Some friendsmight appreciate it, but I can’t quite see myTexas in-laws expressing much enthusiasm.This caveat notwithstanding, Katydids andBush-Crickets is a fascinating and enjoyableread, full of both charming trivia and scholarly insight. The book is brimmingwith ‘did-you-knows?’: for example, theterm diapause (the temporary cessation ofdevelopment in insects) was coined by therenowned Harvard expert on ants, WilliamMorton Wheeler, in his 1893 thesis on katy-dids. The book is also beautifully illustrated,with many line drawings, breathtakingcolour plates, and figures that are all redrawnfrom their original source — a welcometouch of clarity and uniformity that is absent

in many such books. Virtually all of the chapters begin with pertinent and amusingquotations from sources ranging from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Dean Martin.

Why is this group of insects — calledkatydids in North America and bush-crick-ets in Europe — so interesting? AlthoughDarryl Gwynne provides information ondiversity, evolution and the economicimportance of the family, the focus of thebook, and the answer to the question, is thekatydid sex life. Unlike most insects, andindeed most animals, katydid males con-tribute more than just sperm when mating.They generally provide females with a nutri-tious parcel, the spermatophylax, which isattached to the sperm-containing ampulla.The female consumes the spermatophylaxafter mating, while the sperm move into herreproductive tract.

This nuptial gift can represent up to 40%of the male’s body mass, and hence is not easyto produce. Males may mate only once everyfew days, garnering the resources to manu-facture one of these massive meals betweenmating. The hefty donation has importantimplications for sexual selection, because thegeneral rule is that the reproductive successof males is limited only by the number offemales they can inseminate, rather than bythe investment they make in producing off-spring. This is likely to be far more variable

than the factor that generally limits femalereproductive success — the number of offspring they can produce and (whereappropriate) rear. Because females in aspecies usually make the greater investment,sexual-selection theory predicts that femaleswill benefit by maximizing the quality oftheir offspring, but males will benefit morefrom maximizing the quantity.

All that is reversed in katydids and in several other organisms, including sea-horses and their relatives the pipe-fish, aswell as a handful of birds and insects. If malesdo not merely produce a dab of semen, butmust proffer a costly gift to females beforemating, they would be expected not only tobe choosy about their mate, but also to besensitive to the availability of resources in theenvironment in a way that males in otherspecies are not. Such a reversal of sex rolesprovides a crucial test of current theory onhow the sexes are expected to differ.

How did the spermatophylax evolve?Gwynne evaluates two hypotheses. Thepaternal-investment hypothesis suggeststhat males provide females with a mealbecause it increases the fecundity of thefemale or the quality of the offspring she produces, and hence increases the male’s fit-ness along with that of the female. Accordingto the ejaculate-protection hypothesis, incontrast, the spermatophylax serves to keep

book reviews

NATURE | VOL 414 | 13 DECEMBER 2001 | www.nature.com 691

Here are two examples of the“multiple variations on a theme” thatcomprise the diverse species of marineworms, or polychaetes — Eupolymnia(right) and Hediste diversicolor.Polychaetes by Greg W. Rouse andFredrik Pleijel (Oxford UniversityPress, £99.50, $175) examines theseanimals, which are found in nearlyevery marine habitat.

A turn-up for worms

© 2001 Macmillan Magazines Ltd

females busy eating it while sperm are trans-ferred. Males providing larger gifts thereforegain a larger proportion of fertilizations.

In a careful dissection of experiments on avariety of species, Gwynne concludes that thepaternal-investment hypothesis has receivedthe more support; in many katydids, theampulla is completely empty long before afemale has finished her gelatinous meal.

Nevertheless, much remains to be discovered about katydids. Indeed, one ofthe book’s strengths is the prevalence of ideasfor further research — there’s a possible dissertation project on virtually every page.Why, for example, have so few katydidspecies lost acoustical function, comparedwith their equally musical relatives the crick-ets? What favoured the occasional evolutionof parthenogenesis in this unlikely-seeminggroup? Why do some katydids mate onlyonce? The section on risks and survivorshipis particularly dramatic: “in nature, deathusually comes from a plethora of hostileforces”, including parasitoid flies that homein on the male’s calling song, horsehairworms that burst from the body cavity likelethal spaghetti, as well as bats, frogs, birdsand fungi.

One can quibble with any work of thismagnitude, and I did my share. The ref-erences on a few topics, such as the role ofsexual selection in speciation, were curiouslyoutdated. Sexual-conflict theory — the conflict between males and females overmating — is a relatively new, hot topic in sexual selection, but is mentioned ratherbriefly; its explicit incorporation into ideasabout spermatophylax evolution might havebeen fruitful. Gwynne draws a distinctionbetween so-called passive and active femalechoice, a dichotomy I have always disliked.These bits of carping aside, Katydids andBush-Crickets is a book to share with all stu-dents and professionals in ecology and evolu-tionary biology — and, who knows, maybealso with a few relatives at Christmas. ■

Marlene Zuk is in the Department of Biology,University of California, Riverside, California92521, USA.

More biologyCarnivore Conservationedited by John L. Gittleman, Stephan M. Funk,David Macdonald & Robert K. WayneCambridge University Press, £34.95, $49.95 (pbk)

Avian Ecology and Conservation in anUrbanizing Worldedited by John M. Marzluff, Reed Bowman & Roarke DonnellyKluwer, £112, $159.95

Fungal Conservation: Issues andSolutionsedited by D. Moore, M. M. Nauta, S. E. Evans & M. RotheroeCambridge University Press, £65, $95

book reviews

692 NATURE | VOL 414 | 13 DECEMBER 2001 | www.nature.com

Scope for sentimentJoseph Wolf’s illustrations of animals in action.Martin KempThere seems to be a sharp contrast between theVictorian fondness for sentimental depictionsof anthropomorphized animals and the hardobjectivity of professional natural history in themid-nineteenth century. Little apparently linksthe tough impersonality of darwinian ‘naturalselection’ and the personalized beasts of SirEdwin Landseer, famed for such paintings asThe Monarch of the Glen. When we find thesetwo poles represented in the work of oneartist–illustrator, Joseph Wolf, we may wonderhow he was able to accommodate such visualschizophrenia. I believe his work actually pointsus towards a reassessment of both thesentiment and the science.

Born and educated in Germany, Wolfenjoyed an immensely successful career inLondon from 1848 to 1899. He collaborated withsome of the great naturalists of his day, includingJohn Gould, Philip Gosse, Herman Schlegel andDaniel Elliot, providing them with greatcoloured lithographs of striking precision, andhe long served as the chief illustrator for theProceedings of the Royal Zoological Society. Yet hispaintings, exhibited at the Royal Academy inLondon, tell affectingly emotional stories of thestruggles between predator and prey in often-hostile environments, and his popular-bookillustrations verge on animal capers.

The peak of Wolf’s popularity came with TheLife and Habits of Wild Animals, published in1873 as a grand picture book with 20 woodcuts.Inquisitive Neighbours is typical of both thenarrative quality of the illustrations and theirhumanizing titles. When we realize that the text— no less evocative and vivid in bringing thecharacters of the animals to life — was by theeminent American naturalist Daniel Elliot, forwhom Wolf had previously undertaken five suitesof illustrations, the schism between popular artand observational science is less clear cut.

Wolf himself claimed that, to depict creaturesin lifelike action and interaction, the artistneeded an accurate knowledge of the structuresthat give rise to their motion. He was scathing ofthose who know only “the map of an animal”,such as those “ornithologists who don'trecognize nature — don’t know a bird whenflying. A specimen must be well dried before theyrecognise it.”

Even the apparently ‘arty’ expressions joinseamlessly with scientific concerns, in particularwith Wolf ’s engagement as one of the illustratorsfor Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions inMan and Animals, published just a year beforehis own Wild Animals. Darwin providesunexpected succour for those who sensed asimilarity between the way human and animalemotions are manifested:

“No doubt as long as man and all other

animals are viewed as independent creations, aneffective stop is put to our natural desire toinvestigate as far as possible the causes ofexpressions. With mankind some expressions,such as the bristling of the hair under theinfluence of extreme terror, or the uncovering ofthe teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly beunderstood except on the belief that man onceexisted in a much lower animal-like condition.”

When we react with empathy to thethreatened dove’s puffed out chest and the alertlyraised ‘eyebrows’ of the intruding squirrels, we areplaying precisely to the kind of basic expressionsfor which Darwin was defining the mechanisms.

If the more sentimentalizing aspects ofWolf ’s art can be shown to adhere to scientificresearch, so we might surmise that Darwin’s ownpicture of a nature in full-blooded interaction isunthinkable without the Romantic vision ofthose earlier artists, such as George Stubbs andEugène Delacroix, who precociously delighted invicious competition between the powerful andthe weak, and the armed and the defenceless. ■

Martin Kemp is in the Department of the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2BE, UK.

Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art andScience is a collection of essays edited by MartinKemp (published by Oxford University Press andthe University of California Press; £20, $35).

Science in culture

Wolf ’s Inquisitive Neighbours, typical of hisevocative depiction of animals.

© 2001 Macmillan Magazines Ltd