EEP Ursid Husbandry Guidelines. The Guidelines, recently published by Cologne Zoo, include chapters on evolution, systematics and functional morphology of the Ursidae, exhibit design, environmental enrichment, grouping, feeding, breeding, veterinary care, transport and legislation. 146 pages. Price (for interested persons/organisations outside the European zoo world): US$100 (including postage). To be ordered from: Lydia Kolter, c/o Cologne Zoo, Riehler Str. 173, 50735 Köln, Germany.

Cassowary Husbandry Manual edited by Liz Romer. This first edition (1997) of the cassowary husbandry manual has been compiled from the results of the workshop held at Currumbin Sanctuary, as well as from literature, and updated from other research and experience. The manual includes chapters on husbandry, housing requirements, natural history, health requirements, handling and transportation, captive diets, breeding, artificial incubation and rearing, and cassowary food trees. Price: A$25 (including postage). To be ordered from: Liz Romer, c/o Currumbin Sanctuary, Tomewin Street, Currumbin, Queensland 4223, Australia. (E-mail: lizromer@hotmail.com)

BOOK REVIEWS

Until recently, there were probably a hundred books published on aviculture for every one on the captive management of reptiles. Originally, no doubt, this disparity reflected the relative popularity of the two classes with private animal keepers. But today herpetoculture has become hugely popular, demand for husbandry information on reptiles and amphibians is high, and authors and publishers are doing their best to meet it. This massive work, originally published in German in 1992–4, is probably the most comprehensive book yet produced on the husbandry of lizards. There is a section on virtually every lizard genus, as well as on tuataras and – a surprising but not unwelcome addition – crocodilians. More than 400 species have individual, detailed entries. This represents an average of two or three species per genus; but `popular' genera naturally receive fuller treatment – for example, 34 Lacerta species have entries, 28 Anolis, and 26 Varanus. In most cases, enough space is allocated to give a fairly full account of a species' captive requirements; there are also brief notes on wild distribution and habitat, and detailed descriptions supplemented by excellent colour photographs.

Although most potential purchasers of the book will probably be drawn from the big amateur herpetoculturist community in the U.S.A., it deserves a place on the bookshelf of every zoo's reptile department. Indeed, many of the species described – for example, the rock iguanas, prehensile-tailed skink, crocodile lizard, beaded lizards, flat-tailed geckos, and a number of chameleons and monitors – are better suited to professional than amateur management, because of their rarity, size or specialised requirements. Rogner occasionally includes a warning on these lines: Cyclura cornuta is `severely threatened with extinction and may therefore only be kept by zoological gardens and specialist reptile houses,' the keeping of slow worms `is legally prohibited for conservation reasons' in most European countries. It is a pity, though, that he did not think to include with every species' entry a reference to its conservation status in the wild, which is surely one of the first things any responsible prospective keeper should know.

For most English-speaking readers, the bibliography – presumably copied without alteration from the German edition – will probably be the least useful part of the book, being restricted to works predominantly in German and published no later than 1992. A few days' library work by a competent herpetologist could have made significant improvements here: to take just one example, the citation of a 1975 German article on Corucia zebrata by René Honegger might have added that an English translation was published in the Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society in 1987. Moreover, the years since 1992 have seen several important contributions to the literature on this species; it is arguable how far a translation should go in updating its original, but I would be interested to know whether the publishers and the translator got as far as considering the question.

However, this is a relatively minor quibble. The 700+ sources Manfred Rogner actually used were enough to enable him to produce a basic manual of lizard husbandry which will be of real practical value to anyone caring for these animals. And even armchair herpetologists such as myself will find it a useful reference source on the species most commonly kept both by amateur enthusiasts and by zoos.

Columbus Zoo has a special place in gorilla history, for it was here, on 22 December 1956, that the first gorilla birth in captivity took place. That first baby, Colo, is still alive, and despite having been hand-reared, is herself the mother of three, grandmother of 15, and great-grandmother of two gorillas. In all, 26 more gorillas have been born at Columbus since 1956, including a pair of twins.

I was interested to learn from Jeff Lyttle's book that Colo's birth only happened as a result of a daring act of insubordination by a keeper. After a couple of failed attempts at introduction, Columbus's superintendent, Earle Davis, had ordered the zoo's pair to be kept apart, reasoning that the risk of dangerous aggression outweighed the remote chance of a successful mating. With hindsight, it is easy to blame him for over-estimating the risk; but it is hard for us now to remember just how little was known in the 1950s about gorilla psychology and social behaviour. A young keeper, Warren Thomas, emerges as the hero of the story; he and a colleague secretly put the animals together for a night at a time, and a pregnancy quickly resulted. When, after some months, the truth could no longer be kept from Davis, he was too delighted by the outcome to question the method – and Thomas, who had put his job on the line in support of his hunch, went on to a distinguished career in a number of U.S. zoos.

Jeff Lyttle, a professional writer and journalist, tells his story well, and bases it on interviews with more than 20 current and former members of the zoo's staff. Despite Columbus Zoo's primacy in breeding, standards of husbandry there took a long time to emerge from the traditional era of bare, concrete and steel cages, without substrate or bedding. Colo and her wild-born mate Bongo were housed as a pair in such a sterile and boring environment, with no place to escape from the public view; their offspring were routinely removed for hand-rearing; Bongo was tense, irritable and overweight. Improvement, when it came, was inspired by the ideas of two people, Dian Fossey, who visited the zoo in 1983, and John Aspinall, whose `gorillaria' at Howletts served as the model for Columbus's 1984 gorilla habitat. The new style of husbandry passed a dramatic test in 1987, when Bongo's new mate Bridgette died leaving a 14-month-old infant, Fossey. Bongo, who had been present at the birth and shared the care of the baby (the zoo's 15th, but the first to be mother-reared), took over the maternal role with amazing competence. Today the gorillas at Columbus Zoo are held in large, age-diversified groups, with an emphasis on mother-rearing and socialisation rather than mere breeding. Indeed, the way in which the gorilla programme has developed here could be paralleled at many other zoos; and the book serves to remind us of just how radically human perceptions of gorillas, and zoos' treatment of them, have changed over the last 40 years.

When I first visited London Zoo as an adult, back in the early Seventies, I was surprised by the simplicity of the cage and paddock labels. (As a child I didn't pay attention to labels, knowing everything better anyway.) The cage with tigers in the old Lion House said, well, `Tiger, Panthera tigris'. The zoo back home had Manchurian tigers, Panthera tigris altaica, known elsewhere as Siberian tigers, and other zoos I knew had Bengal tigers, P. t. tigris, and Sumatran tigers, P. t. sumatrae. Only the London Zoo had no-name tigers. My home-town zoo had Persian leopards, Panthera pardus saxicolor; London's Lion House held just leopards, Panthera pardus. The paddock with dingos surprised me most: the label said `Dog, Canis familiaris'.

The friend, a Fellow of the Society, who joined me on my rounds (so I didn't have to pay admission), enlightened me on the principle behind the labelling: the Zoological Society of London, that most scientific of zoological societies, didn't (at the time) recognise subspecies. Having now read Harriet Ritvo's delightful new history of zoological and anthropological classification in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, I can now better understand why: the British apparently once overdid it.

Linnaeus, of course, was not the first to pigeon-hole animals, but he created, on the whole, a logical system at a time when the Age of Reason and the Age of Discovery, running parallel, created a demand for order in a flood of zoological discoveries from Africa, the Indies, the Americas and Australasia. The over-crowded cabinets of stuffed animals, sea-shells and bottled curiosities required organisation. Ritvo, a Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, devotes her study exclusively to Britain. In part, presumably, because she reads only English, but also, of course, because Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth was at the forefront of discovery. Linnaeus may have been a Swede, but Cook, Raffles, Bewick, Darwin, Wallace, Owen and other British explorers and naturalists contributed disproportionately to the development of natural history.

Ritvo starts out with a history of conventional zoological taxonomy and rival efforts to name and classify animals and define species. The platypus is introduced as a living `link' between mammals, birds and reptiles, and an example in the quest to make sense of exotic animals that didn't quite fit in. Mermaids (and sea-serpents) had to be fitted in as well. Frequently on show before the British public, mermaids inspired scientific analysis even from beyond the queue. A chapter on domestic animals shows the different purposes of, and disagreements between, zoologists and breeders in classifying breeds. The following chapter on hybrids, animal and human, displays the Georgian and Victorian beliefs and insights on how and why species and races can, will, and should (or should not) cross. A science of teratology developed out of a fascination for human freaks.

Ritvo's last chapter, `Matters of Taste', is devoted to gastronomic taxonomy: `You are what you eat' and `You aren't what you don't eat.' It peters out somewhat at the end into a discussion of the `reception' of cannibalism, and British attitudes towards exotic peoples considered barbarian. Shipwrecked Britons who cannibalised drowned shipmates to survive themselves would never be classified as Homo europaeus anthropophagus, of course. The board of the Anthropological Society of London would have missed the irony when it called its meetings to order using the head of an African as gavel.

Like a dimsum restaurant, The Platypus and the Mermaid offers an enormous variety of titbits. In their reviews of Ritvo's book, both Peter Bowler in Nature and Sherrie Lyons in Science noted the lack of the red thread that would have kept her wealth of detail tied together. But the reviews in the world's two leading weeklies of science both agreed in the end that hers is an entertaining and enormously informative book. I can only join the chorus. But after Homo europaeus anthropophagus, I can appreciate why the London Zoo would have wanted to stay on the safe side of taxonomic disputes. Now, in our age of zoos wanting to help conserve biological diversity, recognising subspecies is again respectable.

Until a few years ago, the Philippines was an area of the world about whose biogeography I was almost totally ignorant. Lawrence Heaney, the co-author of the book under review, is one of a number of expert contributors to I.Z.N. who have given me – and, I hope, many readers – some insight into the biological riches of that island nation, and the numerous threats to their survival. Vanishing Treasures of the Philippine Rain Forest is a fascinating, informative and extremely beautiful book: it is also, sadly but inevitably, a worrying one, for reasons exemplified by the word `vanishing' in its title.

The Field Museum has been involved in the study of the fauna and flora of the islands since 1896, two years before the declaration of Philippine independence whose centenary the book's publication – and a concurrent exhibition at the museum – was designed to commemorate. Both the authors, members respectively of the museum's zoological and botanical staff, have been personally involved in field research in the Philippines. In an engaging anecdote early in the book, Lawrence Heaney describes being present in 1988 at the capture of the first living individual biologists had ever seen of one mammal species. Until then the Isarog shrew-rat (Rhynchomys isarogensis) had been known only from a single stuffed specimen sent to the Field Museum in 1961, but not scientifically described until 20 years later. Faced with the problem of feeding this virtually unknown rodent, Heaney and his colleagues offered it a variety of tasty morsels without success, and finally discovered almost by accident that the only thing it really liked was earthworms.

This story points to at least two important facts about the animals of the Philippines – that we still have a lot to learn about them, and that many of them are extremely unusual. No one will be surprised to hear that R. isarogensis is now, just a few years after its discovery, listed in the Red Data Book as endangered; that is something else it has in common with many other Philippine species. We all, of course, know that islands tend to host unusual, endangered and insufficiently known animals; but even in the context of islands as a whole, the Philippines are in a class of their own – like `the Galapagos Islands multiplied tenfold,' says Heaney. Well over half of their terrestrial vertebrate species – 512 out of 898 – are found nowhere else. Brazil, with 28 times the area, has only around 725 endemic species: Madagascar, twice the size of the Philippines (and with a conservation plight which is much better publicised), has fewer unique mammals (about 90 versus 111).

One reason for the Philippines' exceptionally high biodiversity lies in the fact that they incorporate a number of distinct faunal regions, which remained isolated even during the most extreme fall in Pleistocene sea-levels. So distinctive faunas (and floras) have had ample time to develop. (This topic was analysed in detail in an article by Lawrence Heaney and William Oliver in I.Z.N. 43:5, pp. 329–337.) Vanishing Treasures does not attempt a detailed survey of Philippine wildlife: the central portion of the book consists of 37 one-page discussions of single species or related groups of animals and plants. One of these – the Negros bare-necked fruit bat (Dobsonia chapmani) – is already extinct. Several more – for example, the tamaraw, Philippine eagle and Philippine crocodile – seem poised on the brink. Captive-breeding projects for the first two have been conspicuously unsuccessful so far; and it is hard to feel that ex situ efforts can be more than a stop-gap.

Ultimately, the salvation of the wildlife of the Philippines rests with the Philippine people. No biologist working in this field is likely to be over-optimistic; so Heaney's last chapter, with its up-beat heading `Prospects for Recovery', comes as an unexpected and pleasant surprise. He does not underestimate the damage, but he sees grounds for claiming that `many aspects of the decline that began long ago have been either reversed or at least slowed.' Local awareness of the problems is growing; the system of national parks and other protected areas, neglected and abused under the Marcos regime, is being rejuvenated and extended; those guilty of corruption and mismanagement can no longer rely on bully-boy tactics to keep them safe from public scrutiny. Above all, there is growing recognition that the continuing destruction of the rainforest threatens not only its unique plants and animals, but also the economic and social well-being of the Philippine nation. Practices which are environmentally virtuous actually pay better, and not just in the long run. `Commercial logging now usually results in a net economic loss due to damage to agriculture, fisheries, businesses and roads, partly because of increased floods and droughts downstream.' This lesson is no doubt applicable to other regions as well as the Philippines; but here, as elsewhere, it needs to be learned fast if much that is marvellous and beautiful in the natural world is to be saved from annihilation.