Customer Reviews

Dk Handbooks Insects

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This book has a lot of useful information about insects. It describes basic characteristics, life cycle, and much more. It also includes info on other terrestrial arthropods, such as spiders and centipedes. As a field guide, it focuses on families of insects, not species, which makes more sense because there are so many species that are hard to identify. There are great photographs and descritions as well.

I use this book all the time when I want info about a particular insect. What I like best are the photos, sometimes multiple photos of an insect to show all its parts.

Each insect has a brief description with just a bit of information. The Order, Family, and Total Number of Known Species is shown with each specimen. Many are shown from egg, larvae pupa and adult stages. I particularly enjoyed seeing magnified photos of pubic lice, fleas and body lice (great EWWWWW!!! factor :) There's a key of symbols on each page that show whether they are predacious, herbivorous, etc. Also covered is the insects' distribution. There's actually more info than at first appears, once you take a moment to learn what the tiny symbols mean. For instance symbols to indicate the main type of food.

There's sections on Arachnids, Crustaceans, Myriapods, the life cycle of insects, the sensory system, food and feeding and arthropod behaviour.

Of course to my mind, no insect book is perfect unless it has a picture of a luna moth, and this one does. I recommend this book highly a reference tool.