What Good Are Bugs Insects In The Web Of Life

This book, the first to catalogue ecologically important insects by their roles, gives us an enlightening look at how insects work in ecosystems--what they do, how they live, and how they make life as we know it possible. Waldbauer combines anecdotes from entomological history with insights into the intimate workings of the natural world, describing the intriguing and sometimes amazing behavior of these tiny creatures. As entertaining as it is informative, this charmingly illustrated volume captures the full sweep of insects' integral place in the web of life.

An Oddball Artist's Epic Adventure

We can’t avoid insects. They scurry past us in the kitchen, pop up in our gardens, or are presented to us in jars by inquisitive children. Despite encountering them on a daily basis, most people don’t know an aphid from an antlion, and identifying an insect using field guides or internet searches can be daunting. Miniature Lives provides a range of simple strategies that people can use to identify and learn more about the insects in their homes and gardens. Featuring a step-by-step, illustrated identification key and detailed illustrations and colour photographs, the book guides the reader through the basics of entomology (the study of insects). Simple explanations, amusing analogies and quirky facts describe where insects live, how they grow and protect themselves, the clues they leave behind and their status as friend or foe in a way that is both interesting and easy to understand. Gardeners, nature lovers, students, teachers, and parents and grandparents of bug-crazed kids will love this comprehensive guide to the marvellous diversity of insects that surrounds us and the miniature lives they lead.

Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars disguising themselves as flowers by fastening petals to their bodies; termites emitting a viscous glue to rally fellow soldiers--and you will have entered an insect world once beyond imagining, a world observed and described down to its tiniest astonishing detail by Thomas Eisner. The story of a lifetime of such minute explorations, For Love of Insects celebrates the small creatures that have emerged triumphant on the planet, the beneficiaries of extraordinary evolutionary inventiveness and unparalleled reproductive capacity. To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings, Eisner tells us, but never has a reckoning been such a pleasure. Recounting exploits and discoveries in his lab at Cornell and in the field in Uruguay, Australia, Panama, Europe, and North America, Eisner time and again demonstrates how inquiry into the survival strategies of an insect leads to clarifications beyond the expected; insects are revealed as masters of achievement, forms of life worthy of study and respect from even the most recalcitrant entomophobe. Filled with descriptions of his ingenious experiments and illustrated with photographs unmatched for their combination of scientific content and delicate beauty, Eisner's book makes readers participants in the grand adventure of discovery on a scale infinitesimally small, and infinitely surprising.

The biological sciences cover a broad array of literature types, from younger fields like molecular biology with its reliance on recent journal articles, genomic databases, and protocol manuals to classic fields such as taxonomy with its scattered literature found in monographs and journals from the past three centuries. Using the Biological Litera

Did you know that the mosquito played an important role in the Louisiana Purchase? Or that dung beetles saved the cattle industry in Australia? That honeybees pollinate about one third of the food we eat? Or that the deadliest animal on earth is an insect? There’s an ant colony some 3,700 miles long! Morgan’s sphinx moth has a tongue more than 13 inches long. A locust plague stopped trains as the tracks became slippery with their crushed bodies. There’s a grasshopper in Africa that eats mice. Jim Nelson’s latest book is a treasure house of fascinating facts, stunning photographs and shocking historical events. One moment you might cringe reading about billions of locusts descending on farmland. The next you may laugh out loud at anecdotes and original poetry. Read about the wasp that turns a cockroach into a zombie or the historic 2024 hatch of a trillion cicadas. Trivia buffs will love the “Insect Book of Records” and chefs can add several insect recipes to their repertoire.

Volume One of the thoroughly revised and updated guide to the study of biodiversity in insects The second edition of Insect Biodiversity: Science and Society brings together in one comprehensive text contributions from leading scientific experts to assess the influence insects have on humankind and the earth’s fragile ecosystems. Revised and updated, this new edition includes information on the number of substantial changes to entomology and the study of biodiversity. It includes current research on insect groups, classification, regional diversity, and a wide range of concepts and developing methodologies. The authors examine why insect biodiversity matters and how the rapid evolution of insects is affecting us all. This book explores the wide variety of insect species and their evolutionary relationships. Case studies offer assessments on how insect biodiversity can help meet the needs of a rapidly expanding human population, and also examine the consequences that an increased loss of insect species will have on the world. This important text: Explores the rapidly increasing influence on systematics of genomics and next-generation sequencing Includes developments in the use of DNA barcoding in insect systematics and in the broader study of insect biodiversity, including the detection of cryptic species Discusses the advances in information science that influence the increased capability to gather, manipulate, and analyze biodiversity information Comprises scholarly contributions from leading scientists in the field Insect Biodiversity: Science and Society highlights the rapid growth of insect biodiversity research and includes an expanded treatment of the topic that addresses the major insect groups, the zoogeographic regions of biodiversity, and the scope of systematics approaches for handling biodiversity data.