Insects: Discover the Science and Secrets Behind the World of Insects

This book was collectively written and edited by no fewer than 91 Members and Fellows of the Royal Entomological Society (listed at the end of the book). [Confession: I was one of them, though I only wrote five pages!]. It was produced with close cooperation between the Society and a major reference book publisher, DK, themselves part of one of the world’s biggest publishers (Penguin Random House). The book is in my view very good indeed; I think it is a major entomological publishing event.

Insects is meant for readers that the RES hasn’t seriously targeted before, those who are generally interested in natural history but possess only a basic level of entomological knowledge. As long as you know enough about insects to be aware that you’d like to know more, then this is the book for you. It’s full of information, and it looks great. It seeks not only to encourage much wider appreciation of insects and their role in the natural world, but also (as underlined by the title’s strapline) to make clear that insects have been and continue to be among the most important subjects of fundamental scientific research on how all animals function and how ecosystems are structured.

Insects is quite unlike the RES’s previous venture into mass market publishing, The Royal Entomological Society Book of British Insects by Peter Barnard (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Partly this is about content – the former book was specifically about UK insect diversity. By contrast, Insects ranges much more widely over the full range of entomological knowledge and also presents it in an entirely different way, designed to appeal to a different kind of reader. Thirteen years on, it also has a much more contemporary ‘feel’.

Basically, Insects tells bite-size stories about the significance of insect life to the natural world, generously illustrated in short 1- or 2-page entries, nicely arranged in a way that makes it easy to find the pages that you want (there’s an excellent index too). There are sections that present a broad account of what insects are (‘UNDERSTAND’); how they live their lives (‘LIVE’); how they get on with each other and the rest of the biosphere (‘INTERACT’); in what kinds of environments they are to be found, as well as their immense diversity (‘DISCOVER’). Importantly, in the big section called ‘CLASSIFY’ all of the insect orders are separately systematically discussed, getting either a page or two pages each. This section alone distinguishes Insects from any other book with similar outreach ambitions. Towards the end of the book a further series of shorter sections discusses the tasks of both professional and amateur entomologists in observing and recording insects (‘RECORD’); the extent of human impact on insect populations (‘CONSERVE’); and finally a section that briefly considers how insects fit into human culture (‘CELEBRATE’).

The book’s design is striking. It’s quite difficult to write about book design in a review but, as every bookseller knows, the reaction of the potential purchaser when a book is first picked up is probably as important as actual content in determining whether it will sell. It is absolutely clear that this is a book that booksellers will put out on a table for customers to handle. It definitely looks nice. It is obviously different both on the outside (it has unusual dimensions, 200 x 240 mm, and a beautiful cover with artists’ representations of some well-known insects) and also on the inside, with pages that are light on text, generously provided with specially drawn artists’ illustrations, with plenty of white paper in between.

To be honest, for a serious book on entomology to be structured like this is a bit of a surprise – there’s more than a passing resemblance to a children’s encyclopaedia – but despite this impression, glancing at even a few of those same pages reveals that they are full of informative content. This is definitely not just a picture book for children. Importantly, however, the book’s structure will almost certainly appeal to the shorter attention span of a generation of readers who have grown up in the digital world. And its attractive artistic appearance will keep readers turning the pages to discover facts and ideas about insects that they would never have found by Googling. I predict that this book will sell well into public libraries, schools, and will also fill many Christmas stockings, which will increase public understanding of insect science and that’s obviously a good thing.

In planning and publishing Insects, the RES doubtless had in mind the need to recruit a new generation of entomologists. I tested out Insects on two of my grandchildren; the book proved to be too densely populated with facts for the ten-year-old to stick with it, but the twelve-year-old liked it a lot. He found it to be both visually attractive and satisfying as a factual resource, with the content to be well presented and clearly explained, with no complaints about over-specialised vocabulary.  On the other hand, the adults to whom I showed the book also enjoyed it and didn’t find its content to be at all childish. That’s my opinion too, and I greatly enjoyed reading it all the way through. It offers a birds’ eye view of the insect world that few other books offer. Clearly, this book represents a cleverly crafted approach to satisfying a wide age-range audience.

What about the book’s entomological content? There’s so much to know about insects that there are always difficult editorial choices to be made. Insects seems to me to be quite different from any previous book. The closest parallel in content that I can think of is Insect Natural History by A.D. Imms (Collins, 1947), a well-loved work that is number 8 in the famous New Naturalist series; the classic first edition of that book is now a collectors’ item, and although a reprint was republished without revision in 1990, that too is now out of print. You can still find Insect Natural History in most public libraries. Splendid as Imms’ book was, however, it was not for dipping into; its densely written text required the reader to sit down to read a whole chapter at a time. The insect stories in Insect Natural History were covered in more depth than those in Insects, but there are many more of them in the newer book. Moreover, Insects is much more profusely illustrated and is more up to date by over 70 years.

Among other recent publications, perhaps the one that ‘feels’ to me most similar to Insects is Ross Piper’s How to Read an Insect (The History Press, 2022). That book, nicely illustrated with lots of photographs, is about the life histories of insects with a particular emphasis on their ecological roles. I enjoyed reading this book, but it doesn’t aspire to present its entomological material in a systematic way, and there’s no catalogue of insect orders. How to Read an Insect is in fact a series of entomological vignettes, organised according to ecological niche, quite like the classic entomological stories of Souvenirs Entomologiques by Jean-Henri Fabre (1879-1909). Nothing wrong with that, of course; my point here is simply to tell you that Insects isn’t like that.

So the question arises: if it’s not like other entomological books, then what kind of a book is it? Insects is definitely not an encyclopaedia. It isn’t arranged alphabetically, and its coverage isn’t exhaustive. It is also much more readable than a textbook. There are many general entomology textbooks, and some of them, like Gullan and Cranston’s The Insects: An outline of Entomology (Wiley Blackwell, 2014) or McGavin and Davranoglou’sEssential Entomology (OUP, 2023) are very good indeed. Textbooks can be relied upon to provide exhaustive coverage, but they are expensive and it’s impossible to conceal their pedagogic intent; there’s no doubt that these two factors diminish a textbook’s attractiveness to the general reader. Moreover, the internet is rapidly encroaching on the traditional role of textbooks in providing information. Insects isn’t a coffee table book either; it clearly does much more than provide visual entertainment. Perhaps, Insects may turn out to be the prototype of a new kind of natural history book, combining brief but readable introductions to many aspects of its subject material with an attractive design that keeps the reader turning the pages.

Are there downsides? To be frank, if you are already a serious entomologist, then reading Insects may sometimes prove frustrating. Probably, those subjects that you are most interested to read about will be mentioned, but not in enough detail to be satisfying. Some topics are indeed covered well, with the editors and authors doing an excellent job in encapsulating topics that are actually quite tricky (examples would be insects for food and feed, marine insects, parasitoids). But there are also other topics that are skimmed over in such a superficial way (e.g., insect declines, agricultural entomology, disease vectors) as to be infuriatingly uninformative. There are a few related sections of the book that I think are particularly undercooked. These were those bits at the end of the book that relate to human interactions with insects, from museum collections via agriculture, to art and literature that celebrate insect life. These sections, it seemed to me, are insufficiently ambitious and/or critical. It would have been better to use the space to give a more detailed account of (for example) insect declines. Others may have different likes and dislikes. But I suppose that if every entomological topic were covered equally intensively, then the book would be too heavy to pick up!

As was to be expected in such a huge enterprise, there are some omissions and mistakes. The most serious blooper I detected was the assertion that insect cuticle is “made mostly of a protein called chitin”. This egregious error (cuticle is not made mostly of chitin, and anyway, chitin isn’t even a protein) really ought to have been spotted before the book reached the press. I also felt that it was not acceptable that there was no explanation of the evidence on which the cladogram shown on pp 184 -185 was based; DNA, morphology or both? The lack of a proper discussion of how evolutionary histories are inferred is a serious omission. The inadequate treatment of some other subjects puzzled me. For example, there’s not nearly enough about the evolutionary origin of insects, nor about the now routine use of DNA fingerprinting in studying insect diets, population structures, communities, and (crucially) in taxonomy and phylogeny. Another complaint is that you’d never guess from this book that a large proportion of entomological research concerns their roles as vectors of human disease. Admittedly, the general heft of the book is about natural history rather than application, but surely to ignore medical entomology almost completely was a mistake. Other omissions: there’s hardly anything about the complex interactions of insects with their microbial symbionts, and astonishingly no mention at all of the idea that the incredible diversification of insects since they first appeared is likely to have been largely driven by both antagonistic and mutualistic co-evolution with flowering plants.

Despite these complaints, I would still say that Insects is an outstanding achievement. With only 255 pages, including notes, index, and other end matter, there was never going to be enough space to provide the answer to every possible insect-related query. It’s only because insects are so important that this book was always going to just a ‘taster’ of the insect world. Given this, it’s remarkable how much good stuff has nevertheless been packed into this book. It’s not sad that Insects will inevitably soon prove inadequate as a sourcebook for many readers; instead it’s to be celebrated that it is exactly the sort of book that they enjoy while reading it and will encourage them to develop a serious interest in insects.

Meanwhile, I think that almost every entomologist is going to want to have this book on their shelf. It’s unmissable!