INTRODUCTION Insects are endlessly fascinating They come in many sizes shapes and colors They walk fly jump swim and burrow They eat many things and many things eat them As they grow they often transform themselves from one shape into a very different one A few are harmful to us but overall we need insects for many reasons and in fact we need them for our own survival As an entomologist my job is to study insects I find something surprising about every insect that I encounter The Ultimate Bugopedia beautifully illustrates the diversity that scientists have discovered about insects and how they live With more than 80 profiles of individual insects of different species and with many insect gallery spreads of even more insects within a group along with hundreds of color photos throughout this is a book that speaks to the life of insects How do the bright colors of butterflies protect them from being eaten Why do fireflies make their bodies flash You'll find the answers to these questions and to just about anything else you want to know about insects in this book With Bugopedia as your guide and inspiration you can go to your backyard or almost anywhere to study insects on your own Observe insects carefully and you can make your very own scientific discoveries about them When I was young no single book encompassed the diversity of insect life like this one does So you are lucky With Bugopedia as your companion I hope that you will discover the world of insects and become as fascinated with it as I am Bill Lamp Ph.D.
Welcome to the Ultimate Bugopedia a big source for information on the fascinating world of insects with more than 400 photos Insects are the most abundant and successful group of animals on earth with more than a million known species and many more yet to be discovered As a scientist and as a writer I enjoyed working on this book and I hope you will enjoy reading it When I was a child I loved observing bugs and exploring nature outdoors Those times provided endless small discoveries for me like how bees visited different flowers in our garden at different times of day and how butterflies would try to stick their proboscises in the center of each flower on my brightly colored shirt My early enthusiasm for insects started me on a path toward pursuing my interests in a big way As an adult I've been fortunate to work as a biologist who studies butterflies and plants and as a nature photographer who photographs them In my travels around the world to places like Thailand India and the Amazon region of South America I've encountered countless insects with amazing adaptations for survival You can see a few of my photos of them on this page You may find yourself with a similar fascination for insects and their relatives Some of the insects profiled in this book will be familiar to you and others won't The insects you'll see are from various parts of the world and each has a story to tell Enjoy exploring Bugopedia You'll find another great thing about insects is that you never have to outgrow your interest in them I haven't Darlyne Murawski Ph.D.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK Bugopedia is filled with information about insects Here you will find a guide to some of the pages in the different sections LIFE CYCLE INSECT OF AN The first section Discovering Bugs is an introduction to everything about these amazing animals It will help you learn about and understand them so that when you read the profiles of individual species you'll already be in the know The Life Cycle of an Insect is one topic explored in this section INSECT ORDERS The second and third sections the largest parts of the book feature profiles of different insect species They are organized by the type of metamorphosis that the insects undergo simple or complete The insects are then further arranged by their groups or orders The pages at the right show metamorphosis insect orders for complete
There are eighty three individual profiles of insect species in the book Here is an example of one of them Throughout the book there are photo galleries ten in all that will show you even more species within a group than the ones individually profiled The butterflies gallery below is one example
