How Not to Be Eaten: Survival Strategies of Insects in Nature – Perfect for Science Enthusiasts & Nature Lovers

In this marvelous little book (less that 200 pages) Gilbert Waldbauer gives you an inside look at a Darwinian Arms Race between predator and pray. The main focus is on insects, but plants and various vertebrates also play an important part in this complex interaction of the eaters and the eaten. The weapons used are as varied as the many players: chemical, camouflage, group behavior, flying and other means of escape. A few of the examples used were familiar to me but some, on the other hand, were not. Tiny plant-hoppers that gather in groups that form a kind of pseudo-flower that fools predators and some working entomologist as well, Asian fireflies that swarm in huge numbers so bright that coastal fishermen use them a light-houses to guide them back home at night. I found the authors writing to be engaging and entertaining, done in a conversational style that sometimes made me chuckle but was always informative. This is definitely a good introduction to the research being done in optics and acoustics in the natural world. Some of the insects described have common names and some do not, whenever possible the author used both common and scientific names but you may want to have a computer handy to look up some of the species mentioned, I found my iPad to be invaluable. The book does have some original illustrations that help you to visualize a few of the insects and the relationships covered but, again, I turned to my iPad to get full color pictures of the many insects not included in the art work. Predator-pray relationships are, for the most part, built up over long spans of evolutionary time and can be limited in the number of species involved. Some predatory organisms have a very narrow focus on one or two pray species while others are more general in their approach, with several different species in the cross-hairs. The book is broken into 10 chapters with each on covering a different concept. Who are the eaters? Is it better to hide or to flee? Mimicry can lead to cryptic markings or flashy color and even scary eye-spots. Group behavior and defensive weapons are covered in some detail; is it better to go it alone or to live in a colony? Predators can acquire effective countermeasures and the balance of power can shift back and fourth many times with no end in sight. Of all the wonders that Waldbauer reveals in his book the one that amazed me the most was the "the snake-mimicking caterpillar of the Sphinx moth". Look it up, it will blow you away. What it all boils down to is that the pray must try to keep one step ahead of the predator and the predator, of course, must then overtake the pray and try to get in that extra step. Its a never ending process. The players in this predator/pray dance of survival can find that they, like Alice, are running as fast as they can just to stay place. While How Not To Be Eaten was written for the layperson reader it will help to have a good back ground in readings on Natural History and evolution. For me this book is a fine addition to my personal library and a book that I will revisit from time to time. I had no technical or formatting problems with this Kindle edition.LastRanger