Reptiles and Amphibians of the Pacific Islands, by George R. Zug. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 306 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-520-27496-9. £24.95.

Abstract

Subtitled ‘A Comprehensive Guide’, this book's ambitious comprehensiveness derives from attempting to include all of the herpetofauna that occurs today within its area of coverage, which is basically the oceanic part of ‘Oceania’ (Polynesia, Micronesia, and oceanic islands of Melanesia) plus the Galapagos and the oceanic islands off Central and South America. The New Zealand region is not included because it is partly composed of ‘fragments of the supercontinent Pangaea’. Yet New Zealand is culturally part of Polynesia and its inclusion would have been at least as easily justified as the Galapagos, the herpetofauna of which was derived from South America. The book is intended as ‘an identification guide’ for ‘avid naturalists who live on or visit Pacific islands’. One may question why so much of the species accounts consists of 19th century-style morphological descriptions. Most ‘avid naturalists’ would doubtless have preferred succinct discussions of ‘distinguishing characters’ and ‘similar species’ to the number of lamellae on the underside of the 4th toe, which is seldom diagnostic at the species level. Each species is illustrated by one or more generally adequate to excellent photographs, although only the anterior portion is shown for many lizards. These will not necessarily be sufficient for accurate identification in the case of closely similar species, or in such instances as the Green Anole, shown only as bright green, when the same individual under different circumstances might be dark brown. Because of its vast extent and the very small size of most islands, maps of the Pacific, even when the region is subdivided, are difficult to construct and reproduce and at small size are usually unsatisfactory, those in this book being no exception. The overall map does not extend far enough east to encompass the Galapagos, nor is there a map of that archipelago with the names of the islands. An important feature of the book are 40 herpetofaunal lists of geographical areas. These may be as diverse as the Fiji or Galapagos archipelagos to individual islands as small as Johnston Atoll or Clipperton Island. The five major taxonomic groups (frogs, lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodilians) are listed for all 40, even when absent. So ‘Crocodiles (Crocodilia) None’ appears 38 times. Such hyperassiduousness is simply a waste of space. Insufficient emphasis is placed on human translocations of the Pacific herpetofauna, the philosophy being that the book is intended to be about what is there now, not how or when it got where it is. It is never made clear, for example, that there are no native non-marine reptiles or amphibians in the Hawaiian Islands, all 31 species being human-introduced, mostly in post-European times. It would have been helpful to devise a series of symbols to indicate species endemic to the coverage area, those completely alien to the Pacific, those whose true pre-human distribution is uncertain, etc. There is no bibliography, only a list of 14 ‘selected references’, even though mention is made of journal publications, without date, in the text: e.g. Crombie and Pregill and Bauer and Watkins-Colwell (p. 207). The indexes are next to worthless. That for ‘common English names’ is indexed only by the first word of the full English name, e.g. ‘Dark-bellied Copper-striped Skink’. If you want to look up ‘blindsnake’, ‘iguana’, or ‘tortoise’, you are out of luck. The index of scientific names contains only the current genus-species combinations. Herpetologists frequently change generic designations, so it is usually only the species name that would allow you to relate any of the previous literature to this book, yet the species names are not indexed. Just within the Galapagos, the well-entrenched names Geochelone for tortoises and Tropidurus for lava lizards have both disappeared. Even the familiar bullfrog is no longer Rana catesbiana, but neither ‘bullfrog’ nor ‘catesbiana’ is indexed. Page numbers for the main accounts are not indicated, as by boldface, which a disadvantage for species such as Emoia cyanura, cited on 30 pages. In the text, it would also have been helpful to include author and year as part of the scientific name as this often conveys interesting historical information and more accurately identifies the binomial. For whatever it might have been, however, this book has no real predecessor and no competitor. The amount of effort taken to compile information on so many species over such a wide expanse has to be acknowledged as admirable and commendable. The scholar may lament the paucity of source material and biogeographical insight, but this book will doubtless long be the first reference to which almost anyone will turn regarding Pacific reptiles and amphibians.