Showing 1–12 of 34 results
-
Minibeasts with Jess French: Masses of Mindblowing Minibeast Facts
Artist/Author: French, Jess$25.00 Add to cartIn Minibeasts, Jess French looks at amazing invertebrates found all over the world, from bird-eating tarantulas to glow-in-the-dark scorpions, and from metre-long stick insects to bat-eating centipedes. Jess uses her vast knowledge and unparalled zeal for insects to dive headfirst into the breathtaking world of invertebrates and explore some of their unbelievable adaptations and evolution.
Fancy meeting a foot-long centipede or a spider the size of your dinner plate? With Jess’s help you can do just that from the safety of your sofa.
Discover how minibeasts mate, fight, hide, collaborate, evolve and survive in the most extreme of earth’s conditions. Learn about the exquisite and perfect co-evolution of nectar-drinking insects and the flowers they pollinate. Shudder at tales of wasps that turn their prey into zombie hosts and worms that eat their prey from the inside out. And marvel at the dedication of minibeast parents, from fathers who stop eating in order to dedicate all their time to fanning their eggs, to mothers sacrificing their bodies as a cannibalistic offering for their offspring’s first meal.
Let Jess’s exuberant text enlighten you on the fascinating and extreme world of the minibeast, revealing everything from firefly morse code to mid-flight kamikaze mating, all captured in superb detail through incredible photography.
-
A guide to beetles of Borneo.
Artist/Author: Bosuang, Steven, Arthur Y.C. Chung and C.L. Chan.$60.00 Add to cartBorneo’s mesmerising natural biodiversity is made up of very many species, including beetles, and very many are also endemic or confined to this island. It follows that it is virtually impossible to attempt including all beetles in the present account. This pictorial guide covers more than 150 beetle species, including some of the most captivating or even inspiring forms known. To foster better awareness and showcase the high diversity of tropical beetles, we feature some large and interesting beetles as well as others commonly encountered in Borneo. More than a third of those featured in this book are endemic to Borneo.
-
Ecology, systematics, and the natural history of predaceous Diving beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae).
Artist/Author: Yee, Donald.$570.00 Add to cartThis title is not held in stock but we are happy to supply on special order. Please contact us. Predaceous diving beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae) constitute one of the largest families of freshwater insects (~ 4,200 species). Although dytiscid adults and larvae are ubiquitous throughout a variety of aquatic habitats and are significant predators on other aquatic invertebrates and vertebrates, there are no compilations that have focused on summarizing the knowledge of their ecology, systematics, and biology. Such knowledge would benefit anyone working in aquatic systems where dytiscids are an important part of the food web. Moreover, this work will allow a greater appreciation of dytiscids as model organisms for investigations of fundamental principles derived from ecological and evolutionary theory. Contributed chapters are by authors who are actively engaged in studying dytiscids and each chapter offers a synthesis of the current knowledge of a variety of topics and will provide future directions for research.
-
Bugs in Close-Up
Artist/Author: Hutton, Colin.$30.00 Add to cartMacro photography brings the world of bugs to life! These creatures are all around us, yet too diminutive to be observed by the human eye. The extreme photographic close-ups featured in this book, illustrate a hidden fauna of alien-looking critters from around the world. Covers a range of insects and their behaviours including assassin bugs, rhinoceros beetles, insect swarms and societies (army ants, bees and so on), inter-species relationships (ants ‘farming’ caterpillars), and giants of the bug world (beetles, stick insects and the like). The incredible photography is supported by informative, extended captions detailing the subjects and, in some cases, how the images were taken.
-
Bugs rule: an introduction to the world of insects.
Artist/Author: Cranshaw, Whitney and Richard Redak.$82.00 Add to cartProvides a lively introduction to the biology and natural history of insects and their non insect cousins, such as spiders, scorpions, and centipedes. Richly illustrated by over 800 colour photographs, this textbook provides a concise overview of the basics of entomology with numerous sidebars that highlight and explain key points. Detailed chapters cover each of the major insect groups, describing their physiology, behaviours, feeding habits, reproduction, human interactions, and more. It covers the biology and natural history of all the insect orders while also providing a thorough review of the non insect arthropods, such as spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, and crustaceans.
-
Habitat management for invertebrates: a practical handbook.
Artist/Author: Kirby, Peter.$60.00 Add to cartA practical guide to the management of habitat for invertebrates. Many invertebrates are highly specialised creatures with very precise habitat requirements, meaning that they can be very sensitive indicators of environmental change. It also means that they can be lost from a site through small changes in management of their habitat. This book is a practical manual covering management for invertebrates: it provides guidelines to enable reserve managers and conservationists to take account of the vulnerable habitat features so important to invertebrates. The introduction gives an overview of British invertebrate species, site size and vegetation structure, management need of invertebrates and a summary of invertebrate survey methods. The author then deals, chapter-by-chapter, with each major habitat type: woodland, grasslands, lowland heaths, freshwater wetlands, and coastlands. Although this book has a British focus, information is transferable and will be useful for all those working with invertebrates.
-
Sponges: a Museum Victoria field guide.
Artist/Author: Goudie, Lisa, Mark Norman and Julian Finn.$25.00 Add to cartSponges come in all shapes and sizes, occur in all oceans of the world, and have amazing lives. Sponges have lived in our oceans for 600 million years. Ancient forms even built reefs bigger than the Great Barrier Reef. Today, sponges help clean our oceans, are experts are chemical warfare and can rebuild themselves after being torn apart. Some even live for 2,000 years. There is still much to learn about the diversity and biology of sponges in southern Australian waters, with many species still waiting for formal scientific description. This guide introduces naturalists, beachcombers, divers and others to sponge species commonly encountered in southern Australia.
-
Leech.
Artist/Author: Kirk, Robert G. W. and Neil Pemberton.$25.00 Add to cartReaktion Animal Series. The leech is one of nature’s most tenacious yet mysterious animals. Possessing a hold on the human body and culture, few creatures feature so unexpectedly yet consistently in human history. Popularly thought to be a formidable bloodsucking parasite, armed with razor-sharp teeth and capable of drinking many times its volume of blood, the leech is a most unlikely candidate to turn to as a cure for ill-health. Yet, this is precisely the role leeches have occupied in human medicine, Western and Eastern, from earliest recorded history to the present. Yet for every leech that served as a symbol of hope and progress, there is a pessimistic twin. In fiction, film and popular culture, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and twentieth-century B-movies to a video game-player’s nemesis, the leech is shown to have embodied what is darkest in human nature, representing fears of science and nature run amok. In Leech, Robert G. W. Kirk and Neil Pemberton explore how this creature repeatedly surfaces throughout human history, featuring in radically different practices; from the humoral medicine of the ancients to twenty-first-century cosmetic surgery, from nineteenth-century meteorological barometer to twentieth-century biomedical tool that helped to win a Nobel Prize, the leech has been often present and always surprising. A horror and a healer, the leech has reared its head in many unexpected places and practices, revealing this creature to be among humanity’s most enduring and peculiar companions.
-
Controlling invertebrate pests in agriculture.
Artist/Author: Page, Jessica and Paul Horne.$50.00 Add to cartDiscusses the principles of pest management and relates this to historical methods as well as current and future directions. It describes current practice, the concept of agricultural ecosystems, the role of pesticides and cultural control options. A separate chapter covers biological control and the different ways in which this may be implemented. The book provides a detailed examination of the application of pesticides, the different types that are available and how they may be integrated into more holistic approaches. A summary of all available pest control measures is given to allow the reader to decide which approach is best to adopt. The authors clearly describe why the most ecologically sound methods are not always adopted, but also explain why they can be adopted with great success. Examples of successful implementation of Integrated Pest Management are highlighted, and also a discussion on what is required in the future to achieve successful control of pests in a sustainable manner.
-
Reef creature identification: tropical Pacific.
Artist/Author: Humann, Paul; and Ned DeLoach.$85.00 Add to cartThis reference detailing 1,600 animals with 2,000 photographs and descriptive text is not only the most comprehensive visual field guide to marine invertebrate life inhabiting the waters from Thailand to Tahiti, but also a pictorial tour de force skilfully bridging science and the aesthetic. For the past five years the two authors/photographers have delved deep into uncharted waters, not only visually documenting numerous species for the first time, but also incorporating the most recent taxonomic research of more than 40 scientific specialists. The text focuses on mobile species, highlighting crustaceans, molluscs, worms and echinoderms, however the pages include an overview of attached marine animals, and also explore facets of marine invertebrate behaviour. The guide provides a boon of information for diving photographers and underwater naturalists, known as critter hunters, who enjoy one of the most challenging games in the sea – searching for charismatic mini-fauna of the reef. And for the armchair adventurers, the brilliant gallery of images brings an unseen, unimagined world to the surface like never before.
-
Professional breeders series: Millipedes.
Artist/Author: Sigling, S.$55.00 Add to cartAn Archispirostreptus gigas that seems to float at speed on a wave of tiny feet is a sight that can by now be beheld at many terrarium fairs. The apparent effortlessness with which these invertebrates coordinate their small but at the same time numerous limbs is something every observer finds puzzling. Spectacular colors and the unusual body shape of some species have meanwhile made millipedes to widely kept terrarium animals whose reasonable space requirements render them perfect for trendy nano terraria. Shurá Sigling shares her years of experience with these primeval animals with the ever-growing fan community of millipedes and here presents a manual that provides practical and proven suggestions for how to keep them successfully.
-
Parasites: tales of humanity’s most unwelcome guests.
Artist/Author: Drisdelle, Rosemary.$62.00 Add to cartHidden away within living tissues, parasites are all around us – and inside us. Yet, despite their unsavoury characteristics, as we find in this compulsively readable book, parasites have played an enormous role in civilizations through time and around the globe. Puts amoebae, roundworms, tapeworms, mites, and others at the centre of the action as human cultures have evolved and declined. It shows their role in exploration, war, and even terrorist plots, often through an unpredictable ripple effect. It reveals them as invisible threats in our food, water, and luggage; as invaders that have shaped behaviours and taboos; and as unexpected partners in such venues as crime scene investigations. This book also describes their evolution and life histories and considers their significant benefits. Deftly blending the sociological with the scientific, this natural and social history of parasites looks closely at a fascinating, often disgusting group of organisms and discovers that they are in fact an integral thread in the web of life.
