Introduction to the Study of Insects

"It’s essentially a parts list and operating manual for classification. There are over 900,000 species of insects described. Insects are the most abundant animals on the planet, in terms of numbers of species. As an entomologist, one of the minimal expectations is that you can tell them apart. That’s not easy to do without an introduction to basic anatomy, physiology and ecology. This provides an order-by-order description of most of the 900,000 and step-by-step guides for sifting through all kinds of anatomical features so that you can discern who belongs to which order. That is not an easy thing because of the mind-numbing diversity within the class insecta . The book is amply illustrated and amazingly comprehensive. The authors somehow managed to say a word or two about even the most obscure families, such as Enicocephalidae or unique-headed bugs. I refer to it all the time, and find it enormously entertaining to read about what insects have come up with. If you’re an entomologist, at some point in your career someone will bring something to you in a pill box or a ziplock bag and ask, “What is this?” That’s always a moment of high tension, but this is the book that can help you find the answer. No entomologist can identify everything. The reason there are entomology departments is that insects are abundant, very species-rich and have enormous economic impacts. So every entomologist has an obligation to be useful. Even if it’s just putting a name to something annoying. The politically correct term is insect pest management, not control. A significant proportion of entomologists have no interest in destroying insects. Even the ones whose careers are dedicated to management often are advocates of tolerance. It’s the public that doesn’t appreciate insects not the entomologists. I try to advocate tolerance as often as possible because the vast majority of insects really aren’t bad actors. It’s essentially a revolution. The traditional means for reconstructing evolutionary relationships and classifying insects is to rely on morphology, but morphology can be misleading and difficult. As I was saying, it’s very hard to sort out 900,000 insects. There can be convergence – structures that look similar because they perform similar functions but don’t reflect any close relationship. But molecular analyses that really get down to the DNA level have illuminated relationships that we never could see just by relying on morphology. That’s what made me keep buying the new editions, because people who look at the evolutionary classification of insects keep incorporating new attributes and traits to deepen the understanding of the relationships among organisms."