This is a very entertaining book.  If you like insects, and you enjoy watching shows typical of Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel, this book is for you.

It is intended to supplement the television show presented by the BBC of the same name.  The book reads very much like one of those shows, which IMHO is good in some ways and bad in some ways.

On the good side, the book is very entertaining.  The writing style is gripping and keeps you very interested.  Typical with these types of shows, the books moves from one type of insect to another – while explaining some of the fascinating aspects of each.

In particular, I enjoyed reading the history of many different types of invertebrates – when they first appeared and why.  This is a great book for appreciating the intricacies of nature and I think it’s almost impossible to read any book about insects and not learn something due to the huge amount there is to learn.

On the negative side, I often found myself asking more questions that the book did not cover.  I prefer books that cover a subject in depth and this one did not.  It is meant to entertain and give a good overview to the insect world.  It does not give a wide amount of information for any one species.

The audience for this book is clearly individuals who are not very familiar with the insect world and just want to be entertained.  For entomologist or those who have read a good number of books about insects already (such as myself) it is a bit less interesting.

Therefore, if you don’t know much about the insect world around you, I highly recommend this book.  It does not contain technical details, is very entertaining, and will give you a good appreciation of the insect world.  If you are not new to insects, I recommend instead that you just watch the television series – though the book is worth a read if you find it in your local library.

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Take for example, this lacewing that I found recently in my backyard.

This lacewing appears to be dead.  It has grown pale white and has some ‘stuff’ on it.  In cases like this, I do not know truly what has happened but I can comment on what I have observed.

First, it appears that the time of year does not affect when this phenomenon occurs.  The picture above was taken on October 25th.  The following picture was taken on April 23rd.

This appears to be the same phenomenon and the same type of insect.  It also occurred in very nearly the same place in the yard – a large rhodendron bush on the size of our house.  Also, both subjects were around the same height – about five feet from the ground.  However, it’s likely that I just happened to look in the same spot.

I believe that this is a lacewing – though I have wrongly identified insects a number of times before.

So if anyone has any ideas with this mystery, please let me know!

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Still, I was a bit bored of the usual places, so I decided to pick some place new.  On the side of our house, in a spot where we rarely go, we have a giant camellia that has grown taller than our house.  I decided to crawl under the lower limbs and found a spot in a pile of leaf litter near an old fountain that is no longer in operation.  I then started going through the leaves to see what I could find.

In some respect, I was a bit disappointed by the day because I was really hoping to find a beetle.  While I did not find a beetle during the hour I spent outside, I learned that there are a number of springtails that occupy our backyard.  A lot of the smaller creatures were difficult to photograph and often wound up disappearing on me.  I only managed to get two shots of this springtail before it disappeared.

What interested me most about this shot is this is not the typical globular springtail I normally find in the garden.  Upon looking at my insect book, this appears to be an Orchesella villosa, a species that is originally from the British isles but has since migrated over here.  Of course, given the huge number of springtail species out there, there exists a high probability that I am wrong.  However, the picture in my book certainly looks similar.  I found a number of these, but this was the only one I managed to get a picture of.  OK, at least I think I saw a number of them – as with the naked eye they just look like a speck.  Usually I am forced to take all of my springtail shots at 5x.

Seeing so many springtails in the leaf litter reinforces to me the fact that they are instrumental in the creation of soil.  Also, they were incredibly numerous, though it took some patience to get one into view.  They can be quite frustrating to find in the viewfinder, especially when they are moving (which was the case with this one).  I have come up with a new technique with the MP-E 65 though that has been bringing me some success.  I start at 1x or 2x and once I have the subject in focus I slowly zoom to 5x.  I have found success in this method even when the insect is mobile.

This springtail was much more patient with me.

This is the standard globular springtail that I normally see around the garden, though I suspect it may be a slightly different species than the one I normally find.  For reference, here’s the kind I normally see.

The new springtail differs from this one in several remarks.

1) It is “hairier”

2) It is bigger – both shots were at 5x.

3) This one was found in rather wet wood, while the other is almost always found on leaves.

Therefore I suspect that these are both different species of globular springtails, but I have no idea which ones.  I did manage to find springtail site, from someone who obviously knows a lot more about springtails than I do.

The final springtail I took for the day was on my kids’ slide, a location where I almost always find something.  Unfortunately by that time the batteries in my MT-24EX had already died.  I currently power my MT-24EX with 4 Eneloop batteries, combined with a CP-E3 with eight more Eneloops.  While the CP-E3 still had power, the lamps on the MT-24EX can only be powered by its batteries, so my flash worked but the lamps did not.

This appears to be another Orchesella springtail, but a different species than the first one.  From the pictures on the site above, this may be an Orchesella cincta, but again that is only a guess.  It’s fascinating what you can find when you just look a little harder.  What seems like a lifeless, cold place becomes a thriving metropolis of creatures when you begin to look closer.

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