The text below is grayed out because it is not intended to be read. It is a necessarily imperfect OCR of the original and is only used by a search engine.
|
|
||||
|
206
|
Diakonoff: Book review
|
Vol. 20, no. 4
|
||
|
|
||||
|
BOOK REVIEW
PESTS OF HEVEA PLANTATIONS IN MALAYA, by B. Shripathi Rao and Hoh Choo Chuan, pp. 1-97, 37 with full-page colour figures, Kuala Lumpur, 1965. (Printed at the Kynoch Press, Birmingham, England.)
The book represents an excellently executed iconography of pests of the rubber tree and other cultivated plants associated with it, viz., the so-called "ground covers." The full-page colourplates are after water colours by the second author, while the explanatory text on the opposite page is by the first author.
The plates are arranged in the sequence of orders of the pests, each referring to a group of pests causing similar injury, e.g., bark-feeding Lepidoptera, flower-feeding caterpillars, root-feeding grubs, etc.
The foreword explains the intention of the volume thus: "... a comprehensive treatise comparable in its intention with Mr. Roger N. Hilton's Maladies of Hevea in Malay. ... It enables the planter to identify the creatures that he encounters and to obtain a succinct account of the significance of each. Also included are a number of creatures which are not at all damaging, yet liable to be mistaken for pests, and others which are beneficial."
The book is divided in two parts. The first is a general account of the five major groups of pests, nematodes, insects, mites, molluscs, and mammals. The second, by far larger, part contains the above-mentioned fine colourplates of the pests, their development stages, parasites, and the aspect of the injury, with the text each time opposite the plate.
On the whole, Hevea is not subject to disastrous pest attacks, probably because wounds are filled by latex which helps them to heal quickly; on the other hand these pests deserve attention nevertheless, as the rubber tree is the most important crop of Malaya, occupying not less than 65 percent of the cultivated area and 12 percent of the entire country. The herbaceous "ground cover" often is subject to much more severe injury by some pests, which afterwards move to the rubber plants themselves.
This book is of considerable interest not only for the rubber planter for whom it is chiefly intended, but also for the general entomologist, because some of the fine coloured illustrations depict species, stages, or characteristic shelters, etc., which never have been illustrated before.
A. Diakonoff, Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie, Leiden, Netherlands
|
||||
|
|
||||