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In 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.

Provides 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.

A 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.

Hidden 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.