Primate Communities

edited by J.G. Fleagle, Charles Janson and Kaye E. Reed, (1999) Cambridge University Press 329 pp. paperback ISBN 0 521 62967 5

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This is an expanded collection of papers arising from a 1996 Wenner-Gren symposium at Madison, Wisconsin, the aim of which was to "bring together the efforts of scientists with research interests and experience from many parts of the world to provide a comparative perspective of the primate communities or assemblages from different biogeographical regions". However, anyone seeking a sourcebook for data on primate communities in different biogeographical regions might be better advised to look elsewhere, since the book is really not structured to facilitate biogeographic comparison of the data supplied in various contributions - covering in particular South America, South-East Asia, East and West Africa. This is not to say that many of the individual contributions, by some of the best scientists in the field, do not make fascinating reading, but they are best read separately and mulled over as analyses of the processes and principles which bring about the features of diversity and biomass of individual primate communities. To the extent that overall patterns appear, these patterns seem to reflect an interaction between the biological characteristics of the radiations which have invaded given areas, the areas' own botanical diversity, and well-established relationships between body size and the food value and toxicity of the available fruit and leaves. While differences between communities appear more obvious than similarities, as the editors themselves note in their summary chapter, this may be because the scale, diversity and hence structure of communities varies between regions, depending on detemining parameters such as rainfall as well as botanical biogeography itself. It is difficult for the authors to apply the same unit of analysis, and more so since the choice of level must depend on the questions being asked. The impression left is that primate community ecology is a fascinating subject but one in which we have yet to identify the primary rules and generalizations. Studies in which a single research team sets out to investigate the action of a limited range of parameters across geographic regions and major taxa, rather than progress from the particular to the general, may therefore be called for, such as the current multiregional studies on food properties by Lucas and his group, which are not included here. A further complicating feature, which makes it difficult to identify a take-home message, is the understandable concern of many of the authors with the fate of the communities to which they have, in some cases, devoted many years of their lives, which contributes to a certain lack of focus in the Discussion in some cases. In general, this is a book to be dipped into for inspiration -- and there is indeed much to inspire here -- rather than read with the aim of understanding the biogeography, ecology and evolution of primate communities as a whole (if indeed there is such a thing).