Reddit mentions: The best entomology books

>Could each region be conscious on its own, provided it were kept alive?

There's pretty good empirical reason to think that this is true, at least to some degree. Split-brain patients who have had the corpus callosum--the bundle of nerves connecting the left and right brain hemipspheres--severed exhibit all sorts of interesting behavior, much of which suggests that the two hemispheres might well function as somewhat independent loci of cognition. Michael Gazzaniga has a good, popularly-accessible discussion of split-brain patients and what they might suggest about the unity of consciousness that's worth looking at.

>Could sending verbal signals between people give rise to a consciousness in the same way?

This seems unlikely. Part of what's distinctive about brains (as compared to lots of people with telephones, say) is that the signals between neurons (or brain regions) are extremely low-latency. That is, for any given neuron in your brain (or any other neural network), the time between when it sends a signal in response to some stimulus and the maximum amount of time before every other neuron has a chance to respond to that signal is relatively small. This is related to the fact that neural networks--brains included--are small-world networks: the number of "hops" it takes to reach any node from any other node is relatively small, despite the fact that most nodes aren't directly connected to a large number of others. It's hard to see how anything without this kind of property might support anything like what we think of as consciousness; a large number of individuals with phones (for instance) won't be able to effectively respond as a single unified organism, because information will just take too much time to propagate across the network, making coordinated behavior very difficult. Similarly, human speech is an incredibly low-bandwidth channel: it takes a lot of time to transmit information, as natural has a relatively low Shannon entropy and speaking words is quite slow. Most natural language is extremely redundant, making it fairly easy to reconstruct idea sentence main type even of when you order wrong words the, or to reconstruct a wrd evn hen som letrs re deltd. This is good, because we want speech to be comprehensible with relatively minimal effort. It's bad for efficient communication, though, because we waste a lot of bandwidth making sure our listeners can get the main idea of what we mean, even when things get garbled. The kinds of efficiencies that are needed for integrated information processing probably aren't possible with either speech (which is a low-bandwidth channel) or natural language (which is a low-entropy encoding scheme).

>Is an ant nest a group consciousness or just a bunch of individuals communicating?

I'm certainly willing to call an ant colony an organism (perhaps even a mind), but I'm not sure if I'd call it conscious. I think there's a meaningful distinction there, and that it's quite plausible that there's a strong, meaningful distinction between those attributions. Deborah Gordon has a great book about this stuff called Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior that I've assigned as reading when I teach philosophy of mind for quite some time. It's really, really good and addresses a lot of these questions directly. Perhaps my favorite quote from the book is "ants don't make more ants: colonies make more colonies." This analysis is well-supported from a biological perspective, and is quite telling: in many ways, the best level of analysis for understanding ant behavior is the colony level, not the ant level. Many of the interesting dynamics are being driven primarily by colony features, and individual ant behavior is strongly constrained by colony states and regularities. This suggests (to me) that we should understand ant colonies as organisms in and of themselves, but perhaps not that they constitute minds.

You might also want to look into integrated information theory as an explanatory model for consciousness, which brings together a lot of these points. IIT folks define a quantity called "phi," which is supposed to just correspond to what the Santa Fe Institute folks called "design complexity" a couple of years back--the degree of interdependence between functional parts of a system. They define "consciousness" through reference to the value of phi for various systems (i.e. the degree of "integration" between the parts).

It seems to me that this is probably a good way to capture a lot of what we mean by 'consciousness,' especially from a (rather narrow, albeit important) computational/functionalist perspective. Anything with enough information processing capacity that's also hooked up in the way these guys are talking about is probably going to (for instance) pass the Turing Test, at least given the right amount of training. It's going to be intelligent, that is, in most of the ways that matter to us.

That said, I still don't think that this kind of analysis (at least narrowly applied like that) captures all the interesting or salient information about intelligent/conscious/whatever systems. I like this approach a lot in general, but there are some flaws with the specifics of the theory. The methodology of IIT is extremely well-posed to operate as a general formal structure for thinking about all this stuff, but if it's going to do that it needs to avoid getting confused about what it's supposed to be doing. It shouldn't be advocating for one way of carving up the world over another, as it sort of seems like they're doing here; it should be giving us the tools to think about individuation generally.

At a certain level of abstraction--from a certain perspective--two things with identical computational power and identical phi values might be functionally identical, but that fact, like most anything else, is a reflection of value-laden choices about how to partition the world into systems, components, properties, &c. There's nothing wrong with that perspective, and it might well reveal lots of interesting stuff about the world, but we shouldn't mistake it for something like The Ultimate Theory precisely because the choices inherent in the act of doing all that partitioning render some features salient (or relevant) and other features inconsequential.

It seems to me that what people are usually getting at when they make Searle-style arguments about simulation vs. duplication, the hard problem vs. the easy problem, or the distinction between intelligent information processors and "true" conscious agents has something to do with tacitly adopting a slightly different perspective on all this--working with a slightly different way of individuating things such that some of what you're thinking of as irrelevant differences become important markers of meaningful distinctions.

I think one of the most important lessons that we can take away from recognizing these kinds of concerns is that the claim "x is functionally identical to y" is deeply question-begging, as its truth can only be assessed within the context of a bunch of decisions about what the functions are, what the "substrate" (or whatever) in which those functions are realized is, and why the line is drawn in that particular place rather than another. When someone in the "hard materialist" crowd says something like "I don't believe in consciousness," I think they're really making a claim about the importance/utility of a particular individuation schema: one that distinguishes between systems with identical phi values and all that jazz, but which are realized in different material substrates, arose through significantly different classes of causal histories, or whatever.

These differences in material constitution might end up being extremely relevant for attributions of consciousness in the rather narrow philosopher's sense--qualitative experience, subjectivity, unity, and all that. That can still be true even if phi-like measures are good ways to characterize intelligence or organization (or something like that). On something like an IIT view, an ant colony would certainly count as a consciousness, but (again) it seems better to me to say that what it shows is that an ant colony is an organism or agent. There's no reason to think that all organisms or agents need be conscious in the way that we are, though.

• Alcock's Animal Behavior: an evolutionary approach is a classic and very renowned textbook. It satisfies both your needs and it is relatively updated to the latest knowledge of animal behavior. Although exhaustive, it is a gigantic text. https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Behavior-Evolutionary-John-Alcock/dp/0878939660
  
• It's not a book, but MIT's Open Courseware on Animal Behavior should satisfy your curiosity: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-20-animal-behavior-fall-2013/index.htm
  
• Manning and Dawkin's Introduction to Animal Behavior is also awesome and a really good read and much more approachable than Alcock's https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Animal-Behaviour-Aubrey-Manning/dp/0521165148
  
• Lastly, Broom and Fraser's Domestic Animal Behaviour and Welfare is excellent read if you are more into cats dogs, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Domestic-Animal-Behaviour-Welfare-Donald-M/dp/1780645635

NOTE: You'll have to come by my dorm to pick any of these up (its on campus, and isn't inconveniently located, but I don't want to share where I live unnecessarily. I'll be on campus starting on the 5th of September. Please pay in cash, and no bills larger than twenties.

• Selling: The Call to Write (John Trimbur), Brief Fifth Edition
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-495-89753-8
  
  ISBN-10: 0-495-89753-1
  
  2010 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link- It is the Second Paperback Version on the list(http://www.amazon.com/Call-Write-Brief-John-Trimbur/dp/0495897531/ref=tmm_pap_img_popover?ie=UTF8&qid=1314814988&sr=1-1)
  
  Price Range:$30-$50
  
  Class: ENGL 3301- I'm pretty sure this is the textbook for all Advanced Writing in the Discipline Courses (or at the very least, for the ones that are not for a specific discipline.
  
  
  
• Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Conrad Phillip Kottak) Seventh Edition
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-07-353104-5
  
  ISBN-10: 0-07-353104-9
  
  2009 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link-(http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Humanity-seventh-Text-Only/dp/B005GAF4IC/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314816064&sr=1-2)
  
  Price Range:$30-$50
  
  Class: ANTH 1101-The course was an Honors course titled People and Cultures. A new edition of this book appears to be about to release on the 16th of September- I doubt the differences will be major, and given that classes begin on the 7th, its possible any courses using this text will use the current edition.
  
  
  
• Animal behavior (John Alcock) 9th Edition
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-87893-225-2
  
  ISBN-10: NA
  
  2009 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link-(http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Behavior-Evolutionary-Approach-Ninth/dp/0878932259/ref=tmm_pap_img_popover?ie=UTF8&qid=1314816336&sr=1-1)
  
  Price Range:$20-$40
  
  Class: BIOL 2297
  
  *Notes: On purchasing this book, I was informed that unlike other texts, I could not return it to the University bookstore. I have kept it in good condition, but it is not designed as sturdily as most textbooks.
  
  
  
• Living Ethics: An Introduction (Michael Minch & Christine Weigel)
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-495-09023-6
  
  ISBN-10: 0-495-09023-9
  
  2009 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link-(http://www.amazon.com/Living-Ethics-Michael-Minch/dp/0495090239/ref=tmm_pap_title_popover?ie=UTF8&qid=1314816795&sr=1-1)
  
  Price Range:$10-$30
  
  Class: PHIL 1102
  
  *Notes: A newer edition has been released. The Professor I had this class with does not seem like the type to demand the newest edition, and I wouldn't be surprised if he intentionally requested that students have the older edition. However, it may not be what you're looking for. If another Professor is teaching it, or this book is required for another course, good luck to you.

It can be hilarious when bots encounter other bots. My favorite, which I think will be hard to top, was when two pricing bots on Amazon got into a loop.

Bot 1 was from seller 1, a long time book seller who had a near perfect rating based on a very large number of customer reports. Bot 2 was from seller 2, a newer seller with a very good reputation but based on much fewer reports.

When people see a book at both a high reputation/high feedback seller and a almost as high/much less feedback seller, they will often buy from the first even if the price is a little higher there.

A clever high reputation/high feedback seller can take advantage of this to get a cut of sales on books that he does not have. Find a lower reputation seller listing a book you don't have, and list it on your store, pricing it at their price plus shipping plus a profit for you. For instance, if they are selling it for $20, and it costs $3 to ship it from them, you might price it at $25. Many people will buy directly from the other seller, to save $5, but some will prefer to go with the safe choice and will buy from you. When that happens, you simply buy it for $20+$3 from the other seller and ship it on to your customer.

Seller 1's bot implemented this. It looked for suitable books and listed them on seller 1's site at a higher price than they were at the other sites. It would list them on seller 1's site at 1.27059 times the price they were on the other sites.

Seller 2's bot looked for other sellers selling the same books, and tried to undercut them on price, setting the price to 0.9983 times what it was at the other sites.

When seller 2 listed an obscure book on fly genetics, bot 1 discovered it and listed it for seller 1. Bot 2 noticed that, and adjusted the price. Bot 1 noticed and adjusted.

The price reached $23.7 million (plus $3.99 shipping) before the sellers caught on and stopped their bots.

Here is an article about this particular bot fight.

Vertebrate neuroanatomical knowledge is not the whole picture, and any discussion of nervous system evolution is incomplete without a discussion of nervous systems in invertebrates (and in fact I think the discussion is woefully biased toward vertebrates - not without reason, I suppose, since we are vertebrates and much of this is relevant to health, but vertebrates are 3% of animals and only marginally more of animals with a CNS).

I STRONGLY suggest you pick up this book by Nicholas Strausfeld (who is an excellent scientist, an excellent presenter, and a nice person to boot - I've met him): http://www.amazon.com/Arthropod-Brains-Functional-Historical-Significance/dp/0674046331 . You want the most populous nervous system on the planet? ARTHROPODS

Also, cephalopods should also be a group that you look into, as they rival some reptiles and small mammals for brains, yet we have not shared an ancestor with them since before the Cambrian. And trust me: their brethren the clams are dumb.

He's written plenty of papers geared toward a scientific crowd as well.

I also strongly suggest poking around developmental neurobiology, as it stands to fill in the gaps where studies of the adult animal, phylogenetics, and paleontology do not.

I used to student research in a fly lab... really interesting stuff. Probably the most intellectually stimulating stuff I have ever done. If you want to learn more about it, a great intro book is Fly Pushing by R. Greenspan

When workers accept or reject a queen is fairly complex, and depends on a lot of circumstances, including presence of existing queen(s), pheremonal similarity, possibly environmental or species differences, etc. There's been some study of it lately because of scientific curiosity over how large ant colonies interact and sometimes merge into "supercolonies" that act in a functionally unified way. There seem to be some interspecific (containing multiple ant species) colonies as well, though when that happens isn't fully understood.

One citation to a small piece of the puzzle, summarizing studies on interacting networks of fire-ant colonies:
> [Ken] Ross and others showed that if enough of the ants in a colony, about 15%, have a certain allele, the colony will accept extra queens into the nest. This could be a response to interaction rate. Perhaps the ants respond to the rate at which they meet other ants that have the polygyne allele, b, which seems to affect the odor of the ant that carries it. Perhaps if the rate of interaction with b reaches a certain threshold, possibly leading workers to broaden the range of odors they include in their experience of nestmates, then the workers are more likely to accept a foreign queen.

(That quote from pp. 73-74 of this book).

Alex Wild has a great blog. He's arguably the best insect photographer around. Another favourite of mine is Piotr Naskrecki's The Smaller Majority.

If you want to go more in-depth: Gullan & Cranston's The Insects is an excellent introductory entomology textbook

An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles is a great book about beetles, for iding them i like the peterson guides.

The drone endophallus removal is from multiple sources, including Winston and Seely, and is found in lots of papers as 'fact', such as: "we
nevertheless assume that not every drone leaves the bulb of endophallus in the sting chamber to be subsequently removed by the queen and/or the next drone." (Woyke, J. "Anatomo-physiological changes in queen-bees returning from mating flights, and the process of multiple mating." Bull. Acad. Polon. Sci 4 (1956): 81-87).

The above (admittedly old) paper states that a proportion of mated queens return with no endophallus present, but none were found with multiple present. I'd be interested to see references for drones not performing active removal, since that would imply returning queens might have multiple present.

The UV info I originally sourced from Winston, but further digging seems to show that the endophallus does not emit light in and of itself, but rather the mucus produced is highly reflective of UV light, which attracts drones. (G. Koeniger. "The role of the mating sign in honey bees, Apis mellifera L.: does it hinder or promote multiple mating?." Animal behaviour 39.3 (1990):444-449.)

Alcock's Animal Behavior is a great textbook that ties behavior to evolutionary processes. I just started a PhD where one component is ethology, which I haven't had a course in. This was the book my advisor recommended.

As far as ecology goes, the only general ecology book I've used was my undergrad text, which is pretty approachable if you don't have background- Smith and Smith - Elements of Ecology. I took aquatic ecology and terrestrial ecology, was underwhelmed with both texts.

There is no single answer to the field guide question - you should just look for one relevant to your area. Conservative estimates put the number of insect species in the world around six million, so no single field guide is going to be able to tell you more than very common species for a specific area and maybe some family-level keys to give you a general idea.

As far as textbooks go this one is pretty decent. If you are in a university there's a good chance it's in your library, otherwise it's not super expensive 2nd hand.

If it's maladaptive and variation exists in the population, selection can act on individuals to change the frequency of the behavior in a population. These behaviors as responses to stimuli are coded in DNA, that's how they become fixed (in the hardy-weinberg sense) in a population. Do you think snakes are so smart they are self aware of their own behavior and the behavior of others in the population? We're so far out of what the literature shows at this point I don't think that I can continue this conversation. In each response, you're moving the goal posts. There are some really good resources out there to help, things like http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/animal-behavior-13228230 and https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0878939660

The book I was talking about is just that: "An Inordinant Fondness for Beetles". Beautiful photography. I guess you were talking about the quote. The part about the weevils always bothered me tho. How many do you see on a regular basis? And if Circulionidae is split up, what does God currently have a crush on, according to systematics guys (who are a bunch of freaks, even among entomologists)?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520223233/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0805037519&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1KR8ECR5CM0CF5KVNPEM

TL;DR: Microscopic animals can be very small, down to 50 μm length. The main issue is the diffusion of oxygen.

Smaller animals reside solely on the transportation of oxygen -the main resource in animal metabolism- by diffusion, this is because the surface:volume ratio: smaller organisms (smaller volume) have more surface than volume, this helps the diffusion of oxygen. Diffusion is very effective when the diffusion path is less than 1.0 mm.

Here are some groups of very small microscopic animals:

Group | Length (μm)
-----|---------
Rotifers | 50, 100-2000
Gastrotrichs | 75, 50-3000
Kinorhynchs | 150, 100-3000
Hydra (genus of cnidarians) | 500-20000


As you can see, the most basal groups of animals are pretty small. For comparison, bacteria can be 0.5-5 μm in length.

• Source: Brusca & Brusca, 2003. Invertebrates, 2nd ed. Sinauer Associates, EU.

> In my undergraduate days (thirty years ago!)

<cough> old <cough>

Oh wait, I'm that old too.

> the term "atheist" was understood by those who used it of themselves to be synonymous with gnostic atheism.

Even 10 years ago, well in North America anyway, the number of open vocal atheists was so few in number that the definition of atheism as "a belief that Gods do not exist" (a positive claim having the burden of proof) pushed by so very many more vocal theists overwhelmed the small number of atheist voices. This same strawman is still used by contemporary theists - that atheists are gnostic or strong atheists, that they claim that Gods do not exist, and that atheists have to prove that Gods do not exist.

However, 30-40'ish years ago, there were people that identified the difference between agnostic/soft atheism (non-belief/lack of belief in Gods [due to lack of evidence]) and gnostic/hard atheism (Gods do not exist [positive claim]) - for example Antony Flew in God and Philosophy (1966) and The Presumption of Atheism (1976, reprinted 1984), Flew argued that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. However, since this was a minority view, the distribution of this view was limited.

> While this broadening of the definition has, perhaps, encouraged more people with no particular faith commitment to self-identify as atheists, is there a price to pay for this, with a possible long-term dilution of the term and of its distinctive force?

The differentiation of the broad category of "atheism" into agnostic atheism and gnostic atheism identifies specific positions based upon logic, requirements against meeting the burden of proof, and against the (strawman) presumption of theists.

For those that have not explicitly considered and selected belief in some theistic religion, and associated Gods, the strawman presentation of atheism as "Gods do not exist" as the choice between some theism and atheism leads many to remain with the label of some theism as the "prove God does not exist" argument is a tough one to answer.

Also, this question reeks of anti-atheism bias. Let's change it around and see if this bias can become more apparent.

People that are Roman Catholics and Mormons both still Christians. While this broadening of the definition of Christian has, perhaps, encouraged more people to identify as Christians, is there a price to pay for this, with a possible long-term dilution of the term Christian and of its distinctive force?

I know this one might be out there. But for folks with a Basic background in biology you may enjoy Parasitoid Viruses

If you are interested in how different Alien biology may be then in absence of actual aliens for the time being you can read this one.

This book was required when I took my very first Entomology class (about to graduate with my B. S. in Ento). It's easy and interesting to read and covers the basics:

Essential Entomology: An Order-by-Order Introduction by George C. McGavin et al. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0198500025/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_Jy4qtb0VB34YQ

Sorry if my post sounded rude, it was not intentional, I shouldn't post late at night.

I have worked as an entomologist specialising in pollinators in the UK for nearly 10 years, and I have never heard of a bumblebee queen surviving more than one colony life cycle. This is very interesting. I've just had a look through some of my books (this one, this one, and this one) and they all state that bumblebee queens don't survive their colony, the latter book suggesting an average lifespan of about 6 months for Bombus terrestris. Perhaps the longer lifespans which you refer to is something specific to a small number of atypical species found outside of Europe? Somewhere sub-tropical perhaps, where the pressures relating to the onset of winter are not present. Do you know of any specific examples in the literature? I did a quick google search and everything that came up says the same thing: "annual lifecycle" and "old queen dies before winter". However, when I switched to the suggested search "how long do queen bumble bees live", the first result is: "All being well, a honey bee queen could live for 3 to 4 years, as long as she is free from disease. This is much longer than bumblebee queens or the solitary bee species." So perhaps you saw the 3-4 years bit (which was bolded) and understandably thought that it referred to the organism you were actually searching about?

I think perhaps your experience as a honeybee keeper has confused our conversation a bit. I suspect we are each more familiar a different type of bee! Although I am working on a honeybee project at the moment which is rectifying the gap in my knowledge :)

I tried to give examples, but I guess those aren't useful if you haven't read any of their books.

These are somewhat narrative "stories" on behavioral studies, mostly. Not academic journals.

ie:

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Raven-Investigations-Adventures-Wolf-Birds/dp/0061136050

https://www.amazon.com/Bumblebee-Economics-New-Preface-Revised/dp/0674016394/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494625381&sr=1-1&keywords=Bernd+Heinrich+bee

https://www.amazon.com/Peacemaking-among-Primates-Frans-Waal/dp/067465921X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494625311&sr=1-1&keywords=peacemaking+among+primates

Domestic or wild does not matter to me besides not being interested in things relating to "caring for pet rabbits". Neither does "type" really; a variety would be fine.

3 is definitely a zebra swallowtail (E. protesilaus)

5 is a morpho of some type, but not sure which.

I could probably figure them all out if I had my field guides with me. Not sure about texts to recommend but I knew someone with this who recommended it.

Essential Entomology by George McGavin is excellent.

Looks like its still going on for that book, although not as bad

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0632030488/sr=/qid=/ref=olp_tab_new?ie=UTF8&colid=&coliid=&condition=new&me=&qid=&seller=&sr=

We use both of these for our bioassessment, besides what's available in Standard Methods. The first text there is the one that is referred to in pretty much all of the relevant government manuals and directives.

https://www.amazon.com/INTRODUCTION-AQUATIC-INSECTS-NORTH-AMERICA/dp/075756321X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509585700&sr=1-1&keywords=aquatic+insects+of+north+america

https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Common-Freshwater-Invertebrates-America/dp/0939923874

The Insects: An Outline of Entomology by Gullan & Cranston is pretty much the standard textbook on entomology.

This is a good book on the subject

I'd recommend Gullan and Cranston's The Insects: An Outline of Entomology.

A field guide is fairly regional, so you'll need to let us know where you're located!

if you like beetles, try reading this if you haven't already...

"Fly Pushing" is altering fly genetics through selective breeding and/or direct genetic manipulation.

It is the title of a popular book, too

Your bible https://www.amazon.com/Fly-Pushing-Practice-Drosophila-Genetics/dp/0879697113

Some of the reviews are gold 5/7

In undergrad, we primarily used the following textbooks:

• The Insects: An Outline of Entomology by Gullan & Cranston
  
• Introduction the Study of Insects by Borror & Delong

not anymore

This one?

>The median age of the swarm bees was lower than that of the colony bees, that of the scouts was higher than that of the swarm bees, and that of the scouts was slightly less than that of the foragers.

Source more details in the paper, and sources for others who have done similar research.

I don't recall any details on swarm ages in The Biology of the Honey Bee by Winston, but I know he has a number of tables for ages of other activities and its likely the most accessible being an in print book rather than an article in a journal you likely don't get so I'd start there.

No asking questions! You need to read this and this.