The Complete Insect: UNOFFICIAL BOOKCLUB NO 11

The Complete Insect: Anatomy, Physiology, Evolution and Ecology, David Grimaldi (ed), Princeton University Press,  £30.

If humanity is to shift up a gear in creating a sustainable civilisation, and thereby increase its own chances of survival, while safeguarding the rest of life on our extraordinary planet we need to improve relations with one specific group of organisms.

These creatures may contain in excess of 3.5 million different varieties. They play fundamental roles in clearing up much of the planet’s refuse and debris. They nourish many if not most of the worlds’ reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. Actually, through plant pollination they make possible every third mouthful that humans take from a fork. These are just a few elements of their biosphere-creating relationships with the other key drivers of life – the 300,000+ species of flowering plant (called ‘angiosperms’).

We are, of course, talking about insects. While they are not alone in importance, they exemplify the unrecognised, largely unloved base of life’s pyramid. Without them we’re screwed. It is hard, therefore, not to be impressed with Princeton University Press’s drive to make popular this under-appreciated and often unloved group. Their recent series of family-based spotlight hardbacks on the big insect groups – beetles, ants, bees and now wasps – is overall a hugely valuable piece of advocacy and visual innovation.

Moths and flies are important pollinators as well as being astonishingly beautiful.

The latest, Wasps of the World by Simon van Noort and Gavin Broad, is for me a slight drop in standard, not in terms of the images or production, which are wonderful. The text is rather unimaginative and in keeping with the subtitle A Guide to Every Family, reads as a spreadsheet-like list of the numerical diversity present in various wasp genera and families. Surely, all those parasitoids wasp, with their ghoulish lifestyles straight out of Ridley Scott’s Alien should have supplied a richer assembly of stories to pique the public’s enthusiasm.

No matter. At the end of last year Princeton brought out what I judge the best in this suite of titles – a multi-authored work edited by AMNH curator David Grimaldi and simply called The Complete Insect. It is a brilliant single-volume synthesis of the whole extraordinary group, notable for its plain speaking and informational clarity. The graphics are exceptionally good.

The photographs here are as good as those in Princeton’s single-family monographs. See this exoskeleton of a beetle (above) for example

Being an enthusiastic amateur on insects, I need a very good overview and have had Blackwell’s The Insects: An Outline of Entomology by P J Gullan and P S Cranston since 2005. The new Princeton title, however, is an advance in terms of sumptuous imagery and heightened clarity. As the foreword announces ‘On the one hand it melds molecular- and chemical-level insights into anatomy, physiology and evolution’, while incorporat[ing] recent advances on microscopy and macrophotography to illustrate the incredible beauty of insects’.

Truly it achieves both. Insects are important because they require that we adjust the way we see the world. We have to look at them often with some kind of visual aid – a handlens or microscope. This refocusing makes us realise that most of life is not within the typical range of human vision. I think it is this decentring of our primary sense experience that makes the study of insect so morally important. It strikes me as no coincidence that two of the most important thinkers on the natural world – E O Wilson and Charles Darwin– looked at little things. We all need somehow to see how the world works in ways we seldom observe. Some of the representations of minutiae in this book truly take seeing and understanding to whole new levels. One example is this remarkable image of the underside of a tarsus (in effect, the sole of the foot) on a type of predatory diving beetle. The suction pads are made of tiny little filamentous hairs (setae) that enable the male to hold on to the female as they are mating. Sex has seldom seemed so psychedelic … man. This is a great book: I strongly recommend it.