My favorite childhood book! I'd forgotten it until I spotted the familiar green cover poking from the library stacks. This book fueled my fascination by dragonflies, bombarder beetles, ants, moths..... At the time, before the internet and rapidly produced Nat Geo Kids books, this was the coolest exposure I could find to awesome photos and excellent explanations about insects. Though more nuanced information and higher quality photos are possible now, I've yet to find a book so thorough as this 1962 production.

From a linguistic perspective, it was fun to see how a book designed for young people formerly incorporated far more complex language. Even the rhetoric used to describe the animals in a fun, catchy way presumed a higher comprehension level than contemporary nature books do.

Because this book is probably a 1:3; pictures:words ratio, and as I mentioned, the words are pretty high level, far exceeding what typical school-aged children are expected to comprehend these days, I found it really useful for giving kids the opportunity to choose a section they'd like to learn about, then I helped them to read the photo descriptions, while I read aloud the longer, more detailed sections.

This is a GREAT book to have lying around to bate some kids into reading a more advanced level, but also to provide really great photos of the natural world! The kids seemed really surprised when I told them that a large part of exploring reading is just looking, but I really believe that having books like this encourages exploration that, eventually and later, will lead to more advanced reading. This is a bookshelf MUST. ( )

The author has written many books, including the natural history of a continent, Face of North America (1961).

The Introduction by Alexander Klots points out that for "300 million years the insects have consistently been the world's foremost opportunists", and have diversified into every conceivable environmental niche. There are parasites of parasites of parasites. Not all are known. Perhaps half are named, and few are well-known.

How strange that we know so little of the creatures with whom we share the planet. This book inspires us to watch wasps, stink bugs, nymphs and ants, touching quickly upon the enigmatic and surprising. The ubiquitous forms of life which are successful, but largely untutored, narrowly-focused, and monstrous.

Gems:

Insects have been found deep in underground caves, and a flying termite was captured in a trap attached to an airplane flying at 19,000 feet. Some 40 kinds live in Antarctica. Many are indestructible--surviving temperatures 30 below and hot springs at 120 F.[11] The brine-fly hatches in almost pure salt. Petroleum flies mature in pools of crude oil in southern California. Weevils are anesthetized by pure carbon dioxide in grain elevators, reviving hours later. Many can survive without water, burning carbohydrates in the body, eliminating the carbon dioxide and retaining the "metabolic water". [11]

SIZE

The smallest North American insect is a beetle 1/100 " long. Fairy flies deposit their eggs inside the minute eggs of other insects. The largest moth is the Atlas of India -- 12 inch wingspan. In the past, bugs were even larger -- fossils of the dragonfly have a wingspan of 30 inches.

MUSCLES. Man has fewer than 800 distinct muscles. A grasshopper has 900, and some caterpillars have 4000. [12]. Their muscles resist all fatigue - the desert locust can fly without rest for nine hours. Of course, as size increases, so does weight, and at a more rapid rate. A man is only 4 times longer than the giant walking stick at 15 inches, but he weighs many thousand times more. An insect as large as a man would be no stronger.

Insects have six major assets in the struggle for survival in which their enthusiasm is such inspiration: flight, adaptability, external skeleton, small size, metamorphosis, and specialized reproduction.[12]

Flight - all insects fly, although usually not for long. See Metamorphosis. Good for mating, foraging, and escaping.

Adaptation. No other animal life adapts to such varieties of conditions, even extremes.

Exoskeleton - it is armor. The essential ingredient is CHITIN, flexible, lightweight, tough, resistance to chemicals. Reinforced with SCLEROTIN or CUTICULIN and coated with wax.

Small Size. This has resource and engineering advantages.

Metamorphosis. Insects undergo multiple changes of form. Most spend most of their time as inconspicuous larvae. The huge Luna moth emerges as an adult with such an ephemeral existence, it does not have mouth parts and does not eat.

Delayed fertilization. Sperm cells are stored by the female in a spermatheca, enabling her to time fertilization and deposits. A queen bee can store four million sperm cells acquired on her nuptial flight, for the rest of her life.[14]

What are INSECTS? A separate Class of the great phylum of invertebrate animals known as arthropods. The characteristics of this Class:

>> Bodies typically divided in 3 parts: head, thorax, and abdomen.

>> Legs - six, attached to the thorax. (Hexapoda). Usually with wings, although all are wingless when they hatch from eggs.

>> Antennae

The work has a separate Chapter on ANTS.
"There are undeniable resemblances between their communities and man's." [162]

Among insects, the ant lacks the enormous eye of the dragonfly, and the special ear of the cricket. But ants have a nervous system different from their fellows: While most insects have two masses of fused ganglia in the head, in the ants, these masses have become united to form a single large organ. Unlike most insects, ants can learn.

The harvester ant not only maintains actual granaries, but has special rooms where threshers gather to chew the seeds and make "ant bread". [164]

Contains a Key to the Principal Orders of Insects.