For Love of Insects - Hardcover

Eisner, Thomas; Wilson, Edward O.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674011813 ISBN 13: 9780674011816

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2003

Synopsis

Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars disguising themselves as flowers by fastening petals to their bodies; termites emitting a viscous glue to rally fellow soldiers--and you will have entered an insect world once beyond imagining, a world observed and described down to its tiniest astonishing detail by Thomas Eisner. The story of a lifetime of such minute explorations, For Love of Insects celebrates the small creatures that have emerged triumphant on the planet, the beneficiaries of extraordinary evolutionary inventiveness and unparalleled reproductive capacity.

To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings, Eisner tells us, but never has a reckoning been such a pleasure. Recounting exploits and discoveries in his lab at Cornell and in the field in Uruguay, Australia, Panama, Europe, and North America, Eisner time and again demonstrates how inquiry into the survival strategies of an insect leads to clarifications beyond the expected; insects are revealed as masters of achievement, forms of life worthy of study and respect from even the most recalcitrant entomophobe. Filled with descriptions of his ingenious experiments and illustrated with photographs unmatched for their combination of scientific content and delicate beauty, Eisner's book makes readers participants in the grand adventure of discovery on a scale infinitesimally small, and infinitely surprising.

About this title

About the Authors

Thomas Eisner was J.G. Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. His film Secret Weapons won the Grand Award at the New York Film Festival and was named Best Science Film by the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Edward O. Wilson was Pellegrino University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University. In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes (one of which he shares with Bert Hölldobler), Wilson has won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Reviews

Among the many wondrous tales that Eisner relates in this memoir of his research on insects is that of a tiny millipede (a polyxenid) that defends itself by coating its attacker—usually an ant—with bristles. Scanning electron micrographs taken by Maria Eisner, coworker and wife of Thomas Eisner, show how the entangling mechanism works. The bristle tips are grappling hooks that become fastened to the ant’s hairs. To make matters worse, barbs on the bristle shafts cross-link the bristles, creating a loose meshwork that muzzles the ant and strings its legs together. After observing an attack, Eisner wrote that the ants "attempted to clean themselves, but in so doing seemed only to aggravate their plight. They wiped antennae with forelegs, drew appendages through the mouthparts, or stroked legs against one another, but they usually succeeded only in further entangling themselves. . . . Many lost their footing and fell to the side, without ever recovering. . . . The polyxenids, without exception, survived the encounters." Unlike the polyxenids, most of the insects Eisner has studied use chemicals to defend themselves. In fact, his discoveries of these defenses, beginning in the 1950s just after he earned his doctorate from Harvard University, helped to found a new field of biology, chemical ecology. He has, ever since, been busy making new discoveries about these surprising strategies in the field and in laboratory experiments at Cornell University, where he is J. G. Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology. The findings he describes are intriguing—all the more so in that they provide the scaffolding on which we see at work the mind of one of our most distinguished scientists and naturalists. Exquisitely illustrated with photographs, most taken by Eisner, who is widely admired for his photography, the book is written in a style that is conversational, witty and graphic. Beautiful to look at and beautiful to read.

Editors of Scientific American

An avowed "entomophile" (insect lover), Eisner has written an absorbing book on his years of studying insects. E. O. Wilson points out in his introduction that the keys to Eisner's success are excellence both as a field biologist and as a laboratory experimentalist, and these strengths are revealed in his personal accounts of the animals he studied and the discoveries he made. The text ranges from the anecdotal, as when the author was sprayed by a stick insect and declares the secretion "evil stuff," to the scientific, when he discusses the chemical composition of such sprays. The author is also an accomplished photographer, and the book is heavily illustrated with color photographs that are not only masterful at illustrating his experiments but also surprisingly beautiful. Although insects are not usually the stars of popular-science writing, this engaging look at how one scientist studies their lives may add them to the most-requested lists of science- and animal-loving readers. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/pdf/EISFOR_excerpt.pdf

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674011813
• ISBN 13: 9780674011816
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464