Naming your book ‘The Complete…[Anything]’ is quite a statement, calling it The Complete Insect when there are 3.5 million such species might seem like asking for trouble, but this book carries off such a claim very well. It is a book packed with gorgeous photographs, informative and clear diagrams and a wealth of facts. There are five authors of the six chapters, all of whom look to me to be experts in their fields.
Here one learns that the spermatozoa of the fly Drosphila are 20 times the length of the insect’s body (yes, I thought the same…), that sex determination in some hymenoptera is through haplodiploidy (fertilised eggs are female, unfertilised are male), that there are just 20 species of Mantophasmotodea (rock crawlers) compared with 380,000 Coleoptera (beetles) and that deep-fried grasshoppers might be yummy. Despite a wealth of unfamiliar (to me) terms, such as hypermetamorphosis, larviparity, chordotonal organs and hemimetabolism this book conveys just masses of information very clearly.
I first thought that this might be a textbook for undergraduates but it is aimed at existing insect enthusiasts and armchair naturalists who want to be informed, amazed and delighted by the variety of insects and their adaptations. It is a complete delight.
The cover? Classy and an accurate reflection of the images inside this book. I’d give it 8/10.
The Complete Insect: anatomy, physiology, evolution and ecology edited by David A. Grimaldi is published by Princeton University Press.
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