SUBJECT INDEX:

NATURE:

Insects & Spiders

100 Caterpillars
Jeffrey C. Miller
Daniel H. Janzen
Winifred Hallwachs
Gathered by biologists in the tropical forests of Costa Rica, over 100 large-format photographs of caterpillars document the dizzying variety of shapes, vivid colors, and cryptic markings among these species. The pictures are accompanied by capsule species accounts and magnificent images of the adult butterfly or moth. Throughout, the authors convey an intimate sense of these creatures by focusing on how their features figure in their behavior and ecology, and on the beauty of nature in this life stage.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2009
Asian Honey Bees
with a foreword by Thomas D. Seeley
Benjamin P. Oldroyd
Siriwat Wongsiri
Foreword by Thomas D. Seeley
Benjamin Oldroyd has teamed with Siriwat Wongsiri to provide a comparative work synthesizing the rapidly expanding Asian honey bee literature. The authors underscore the pressures colonies face and detail the long and amazing history of the honey hunt. This book provides a cornerstone for future investigations on these species, insights into the evolution across species, and a direction for conservation efforts to protect these keystone species of Asia's tropical forests.
Hardcover 2006
The Birder’s Bug Book
Gilbert Waldbauer
Gilbert Waldbauer, a veteran entomologist and an accomplished birdwatcher, presents an excellent introduction to the intricate interplay of insects and birds, with a beguiling blend of anecdote, ornithology, and entomology. Profusely illustrated with drawings and color photographs, this book offers a cornucopia of facts about the life history and behavior of insects and birds.
Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
Bolton's Catalogue of Ants of the World
Barry Bolton
Gary Alpert
Philip S. Ward
Piotr Naskrecki
Barry Bolton's New General Catalogue of the Ants of the World, published in 1995, was the first attempt in more than one hundred years to collect all taxonomic decisions for ants worldwide, including extinct as well as extant taxa. The new edition incorporates all taxonomic papers--from 1758 through 2005--on 14,550 species and subspecies of ants.
CD-ROM 2007
The Earwig's Tail
May R. Berenbaum
Throughout the Middle Ages, enormously popular bestiaries presented people with descriptions of rare and unusual animals, typically paired with a moral or religious lesson. In The Earwig’s Tail, entomologist May Berenbaum and illustrator Jay Hosler draw on the powerful cultural symbols of these antiquated books to create a beautiful and witty bestiary of the insect world.
Hardcover 2009
The Fire Ants
Walter R. Tschinkel
In The Fire Ants, Walter Tschinkel provides not just an encyclopedic overview of Solenopsis invicta but a lively account of how research is done, how science establishes facts, and the pleasures and problems of a scientific career. The reader learns much about ants, the practice of science, and humans' role in the fire ant's North American success.
Hardcover 2006
For Love of Insects
Thomas Eisner
Foreword by Edward O. Wilson
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.
Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
Harvestmen
Edited by Ricardo Pinto-da-Rocha
Edited by Glauco Machado
Edited by Gonzalo Giribet
This is the first comprehensive treatment of a major order of arachnids featuring more than 6,000 species worldwide, familiar in North America as daddy-longlegs but known scientifically as the Opiliones, or harvestmen. The 25 authors provide a broad taxonomic and ecological background for understanding this major arachnid group, the book should give field biologists worldwide the means to identify specimens and provide an invaluable reference for understanding harvestmen diversity and biology.
Hardcover 2007
Insects through the Seasons
Gilbert Waldbauer
The unparalleled success of insects is the story told in this highly entertaining book. How do these often tiny but indefatigable creatures do it? Gilbert Waldbauer pursues this question from hot springs and Himalayan slopes to roadsides and forests, scrutinizing insect life in its many manifestations.
Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
Millions of Monarchs, Bunches of Beetles
Gilbert Waldbauer
Insects that are the least bit social may gather in modest groups, like the dozen or so sawfly larvae feeding on a pine needle, or they may form huge masses, like a swarm of migratory locusts in Africa or a cloud of mayflies at the edge of a midwestern lake. Why these insects get together and what they get out of their associations are questions finely and fully considered in this learned and entertaining look at the group behavior and social lives of a wide array of bugs.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
The Other Insect Societies
James T. Costa
Foreword by Bert Hölldobler
Commentaries by Edward O. Wilson
In his exploration of insect societies that don't fit the eusocial schema, James T. Costa gives these interesting phenomena their due. He synthesizes the scattered literature about social phenomena across the arthropod phylum: beetles and bugs, caterpillars and cockroaches, mantids and membracids, sawflies and spiders. This wide-ranging tour takes a rich narrative approach that interweaves theory and data analysis with the behavior and ecology of these remarkable groups. This book is likely to inspire a new generation of naturalists to take a closer look.
Hardcover 2006
Predator upon a Flower
Douglass H. Morse
In the crab spider, Misumena vatia, Morse and his colleagues found an ideal species on which to test basic questions of lifetime fitness. Ecologists had previously identified variables shaping populations, but lacked the experimental data needed to comprehensively test individuals making foraging decisions. Predator upon a Flower recounts Morse's influential experimental discoveries, moving from individuals to communities to ecosystems, and suggests directions for future research in spider biology.
Hardcover 2007
The Sand Wasps
Howard E. Evans
Kevin M. O'Neill
Foreword by Mary Alice Evans
Howard Evans was a brilliant ethologist and systematist, describing over 900 species in over a dozen entomology and natural history books. Upon his death in 2002, he left behind an unfinished manuscript, intended as an update of his classic 1966 work, The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps. O'Neill, Evans's former student and coauthor, has completed and enlarged this work into a tribe-by-tribe, species-by-species review of Bembicinae studies from the last four decades.
Hardcover 2007
Secret Weapons
Thomas Eisner
Maria Eisner
Melody Siegler
Part handbook, part field guide, part photo album, Secret Weapons, the follow-up to the award-winning For Love of Insects, chronicles the diverse and often astonishing defensive strategies that have allowed insects, spiders, scorpions, and other many-legged creatures not just to survive, but to thrive.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
The Social Behavior of the Bees
Charles D. Michener
Hardcover 1974
The Social Biology of Ropalidia marginata
Raghavendra Gadagkar
In this book, the biologist Raghavendra Gadagkar focuses on the single species he has worked on throughout his career. His years of study have led him to believe that ecological, physiological, and demographic factors can be more important than genetic relatedness in the selection for or against social traits.
Hardcover 2001
A Walk around the Pond
Gilbert Waldbauer
In his hallmark companionable style, Gilbert Waldbauer introduces us to the aquatic insects that have colonized ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers, especially those in North America. Along the way we learn about the diverse forms these arthropods take, as well as their remarkable modes of life. While learning about the evolution, natural history, and ecology of these insects, readers also discover more than a little about the scientists who study them.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
What Good Are Bugs?
Gilbert Waldbauer
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.
Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004