Miniature Lives: Identifying Insects in Your Home and Garden

by Colleen Codekas

Overview

Miniature Lives provides a range of simple strategies that people can use to identify and learn more about the insects in their Australian homes and gardens. Featuring a step-by-step, illustrated identification key and color photographs, the book guides the reader through the basics of entomology. Simple explanations, amusing analogies and quirky facts convey information on diet, life cycle, habitat and risks in a way that is both interesting and easy to understand. Identifying an insect using field guides or internet searches can be daunting – Miniature Lives allows the reader to identify an insect without having to capture or touch it.

* Provides a range of simple strategies that people can use to identify and learn more about the insects in their homes and gardens
* Enables the reader to assess if the insect is beneficial or harmful to their family, pets, home or garden
* Assists the reader to identify an insect without having to capture or touch it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781486301379
Publisher:	CSIRO Publishing
Publication date:	06/08/2016
Pages:	344
Sales rank:	440,244
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Michelle Gleeson is an entomologist at the University of Queensland. She also operates her own business, Bugs Ed, which educates around 10,000 people across Queensland each year on the wonderful world of insects.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

1 INTRODUCTION
Why I wrote this book
Approaches to identifying insects
How to use this book

2 INSECT BASICS
What is an insect?
Insect body parts
Taxonomy – how insects are named
Insect orders – how insects are grouped
Insect growth and lifecycles

3 MORPHOLOGY – WHAT INSECTS LOOK LIKE
Using this chapter
Tips for getting started
Tools of the trade
The identification key
The little guys – insects less than 5 mm long
Maggots, grubs and caterpillars

4 HABITAT – WHERE INSECTS LIVE AND OCCUR
Using this chapter
Tips for getting started
Kitchen and pantry
Living room
Bathroom
Bedroom
Around lights
In water
Soil, leaf litter and compost
On trees and shrubs
On citrus trees
In the vegetable garden
On native trees and shrubs
In and around the lawn
In and around flowers
On the bodies of animals – the bloodsuckers
In large groups – masses and migrations

5 CLEVER CLUES – THE STRANGE STRUCTURES AND EVIDENCE THAT INSECTS LEAVE BEHIND
Using this chapter
Tips for getting started
Choose the clue
Markings on leaves and bark
Lumps and bumps on plants
Nests and hideouts
Cocoons, cases and eggs

6 INSECT ORDERS
How to use this chapter
Bees, wasps, ants and sawflies – Order Hymenoptera
Beetles – Order Coleoptera
Booklice – Order Psocoptera
Butterflies and moths – Order Lepidoptera
Cockroaches – Order Blattodea
Dragonflies and damselflies – Order Odonata
Earwigs – Order Dermaptera
Fleas – Order Siphonaptera
Flies – Order Diptera
Grasshoppers and crickets – Order Orthoptera
Lacewings – Order Neuroptera
Lice – Order Phthiraptera
Praying mantids – Order Mantodea
Silverfish – Order Thysanura
Stick and leaf insects – Order Phasmatodea
Termites – Order Isoptera
Thrips – Order Thysanoptera
True bugs – Order Hemiptera
Non–insect arthropods

GLOSSARY AND PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
FURTHER READING
INDEX

Editorial Reviews

"This indispensable guide to insect-watching will fill an important role in insect conservation and as a reference work, as it introduces new generations to the diverse, secretive, often beautiful and always intriguing miniature lives of insects."

Densey Cline