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How Insects Work: An Illustrated Guide to the Wonders of Form and Function—from Antenna to Wings
The extraordinary inner-workings of the world’s amazing, adaptable insects
A tiny textbook to learn on your own
How Insects Work goes beyond the typical field guide to show us not only what insects look like but why. Arguably the most successful land animals—still going strong after five mass extinctions—insects have evolved a spectacular array of real-life superpowers to help them thrive in virtually every environment: Bumblebees’ wingbeats leave a faint electrical signal at each flower they visit to show that the nectar’s already been taken (see page 57), and houseflies defy gravity with tiny leg hairs that stick to the smoothest wall or ceiling (see page 69). In this in-depth, photo-filled handbook, discover the ways insects are even more astounding than you know—inside and out:
Evolution
Exoskeleton and Body Segments
Senses
Circulation
Digestion
Respiration
Reproduction
Metamorphosis
Movement
And much, much more!
A tiny textbook to learn on your own
How Insects Work goes beyond the typical field guide to show us not only what insects look like but why. Arguably the most successful land animals—still going strong after five mass extinctions—insects have evolved a spectacular array of real-life superpowers to help them thrive in virtually every environment: Bumblebees’ wingbeats leave a faint electrical signal at each flower they visit to show that the nectar’s already been taken (see page 57), and houseflies defy gravity with tiny leg hairs that stick to the smoothest wall or ceiling (see page 69). In this in-depth, photo-filled handbook, discover the ways insects are even more astounding than you know—inside and out:
Evolution
Exoskeleton and Body Segments
Senses
Circulation
Digestion
Respiration
Reproduction
Metamorphosis
Movement
And much, much more!
224 pages, Paperback
Published April 28, 2020
124 people are currently reading
266 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 8, 2022
Review I thought this book was going to be informative, at times revealing beauty and sometimes horrible things. I was right on all of them. I think one of the most horrible things was the Pacific beetle cockroach, Diploptera punctata, gives birth to live young and has 'milk' to feed them with. Cockroach cows. Imagine baby cockroaches clustered around their mother drinking milk. Disgusting.
A truly interesting fact is that ants really do have an alternate world on Earth. The total biomass of ants is about the same as humans. They have so much in common with us. They have agriculture, 'dairy' farming, meat farming, fungus farming. They are good engineers building and maintaing bridges and roads. They have armies and spies, fight wars, make peace with neighbouring ants (sometimes). Reprehensibly in people but not ants, they also take slaves.
They have cities and even mega cities. Red Wood Ants on the island Hokkaido in Japan "was formed from 45 individual nests and is estimated to hold 1.1 million queens and 306 million workers". Even bigger is a colony of Argentinian ants in Melbourne, Australia - it is 60 miles across. Imagine that!
But there are three big differences between ants and us in our civilizations. Ants have been doing all that they are doing for millions of years without any progress, all by instinct or hive mind. And all the ones that count are female. The third difference is the one that really counts. Should conditions, natural or man-made be such that humans can no longer survive, ants will. There are more than 12,000 species of ants, some of them will be able to adapt and then it will be just their world, as it was before us. Not that they will notice...
It was an interesting book and one I very much enjoyed. 5 star.
__________
Reading notes Horrible thought: nearly every time a house fly lands, it defacaetes.. So in addition to vomiting on anything it thinks might make a tasty meal, the house fly almost always does poop where it eats.
The book is really quite good. I keep having to reread passages as a lot of it is new to me. I thought I knew all about insects physically but it turns out I don't. They don't have lungs, their hearts are very long narrow pumping machines, they don't have blood vessels - their body cavity is bathed in haemolyph (their version of blood), females are in many species, bigger than the males.
Where we are the same: males are bent on mating with as many females as possible, whereas females are being very selective and looking for the right father for their babies!
A truly interesting fact is that ants really do have an alternate world on Earth. The total biomass of ants is about the same as humans. They have so much in common with us. They have agriculture, 'dairy' farming, meat farming, fungus farming. They are good engineers building and maintaing bridges and roads. They have armies and spies, fight wars, make peace with neighbouring ants (sometimes). Reprehensibly in people but not ants, they also take slaves.
They have cities and even mega cities. Red Wood Ants on the island Hokkaido in Japan "was formed from 45 individual nests and is estimated to hold 1.1 million queens and 306 million workers". Even bigger is a colony of Argentinian ants in Melbourne, Australia - it is 60 miles across. Imagine that!
But there are three big differences between ants and us in our civilizations. Ants have been doing all that they are doing for millions of years without any progress, all by instinct or hive mind. And all the ones that count are female. The third difference is the one that really counts. Should conditions, natural or man-made be such that humans can no longer survive, ants will. There are more than 12,000 species of ants, some of them will be able to adapt and then it will be just their world, as it was before us. Not that they will notice...
It was an interesting book and one I very much enjoyed. 5 star.
__________
Reading notes Horrible thought: nearly every time a house fly lands, it defacaetes.. So in addition to vomiting on anything it thinks might make a tasty meal, the house fly almost always does poop where it eats.
The book is really quite good. I keep having to reread passages as a lot of it is new to me. I thought I knew all about insects physically but it turns out I don't. They don't have lungs, their hearts are very long narrow pumping machines, they don't have blood vessels - their body cavity is bathed in haemolyph (their version of blood), females are in many species, bigger than the males.
Where we are the same: males are bent on mating with as many females as possible, whereas females are being very selective and looking for the right father for their babies!
February 23, 2022
I rather suspect that this book was written for the benefit of young adult readers, but I enjoyed it and learned a few things. It looks at insects part by part and function by function, so there are sections for wings and antennae, reproduction, metamorphosis, instar, and others. To keep the reader from having to guess at what is being described, the book is also well illustrated, with both pictures and detailed line drawings, such as the mouthparts of an insect: labrum, mandibles, maxillae, hypopharynx, labia.
Insects evolved from arthropods about 350 million years ago (MYA) and are the only winged invertebrates that have ever lived. About 300 MYA the atmospheric oxygen level rose to about 30 percent, almost twice what it is today. Insects don’t have lungs, and breathe through pores in their skin, so more oxygen meant they could absorb more and grow large, very large. Think of dragonflies the size of seagulls and centipedes over two meters long. Eventually, and fortunately, oxygen levels dropped and insect size decreased in time for the first dinosaurs to evolve about 240 MYA.
The book includes in a number of interesting facts. For instance:
- The United States, with its huge land area, has about 91,000 described insect species, some 10 percent of the total...The UK has some 24,000 described species, while Australian has about 75,000 named species and probably at least 100,000 that are yet to be described. (p. 41)
- The cells that make up animal bodies are, on average, the same size, regardless of the actual size of the whole animal. Each gram of animal tissue contains about 1 billion cells, so a honey bee weighing one tenth of a gram has some 100 million cells in its body. (p. 286)
- All insects begin their lives as a single fertilized cell, so the number of cell divisions that they go through during their lives is astronomical. The rate of division in the earliest life of an embryo is extremely rapid – in fruit fly embryos, one cell has become 6,000 within about three hours of fertilization.” (p. 292)
- The heaviest insect is the Little Barrier Island Giant Weta, which can weigh 2½ ounces. The longest is the extremely spindly stick insect Phryganistria chinensis, which can reach more than 24 inches length. The Hercules Beetle is the longest-bodied beetle at up to 6 2/3 inches, more than half of that length made up of its enormously long thoracic 'horn' The smallest insects are male wasps of the family Mymaridae, which can be just 0.14mm long.” (p. 324)
- There are somewhere between 10 trillion and 10,000 trillion ants alive on Earth today, making them the most abundant insect group in terms of numbers of individuals. Their total biomass is about the same as Earth’s human biomass.” (p. 327)
I’ve never considered myself a bug guy, but there is some really interesting information here. I picked up the book in part because I had read that pill bugs (aka: rolly pollys) are in fact not insects at all but the only existing terrestrial arthropods, gill-breathing distant relatives of shrimp and crayfish, with an evolutionary pedigree stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Considering that modern Homo sapiens evolved only about 300,000 years ago, those little bugs scurrying around under my garden mulch are worthy of some passing respect. Anyway, I enjoyed this book and intend to look for another by the same author: How Birds Work. I expect to be similarly entertained and informed.
Insects evolved from arthropods about 350 million years ago (MYA) and are the only winged invertebrates that have ever lived. About 300 MYA the atmospheric oxygen level rose to about 30 percent, almost twice what it is today. Insects don’t have lungs, and breathe through pores in their skin, so more oxygen meant they could absorb more and grow large, very large. Think of dragonflies the size of seagulls and centipedes over two meters long. Eventually, and fortunately, oxygen levels dropped and insect size decreased in time for the first dinosaurs to evolve about 240 MYA.
The book includes in a number of interesting facts. For instance:
- The United States, with its huge land area, has about 91,000 described insect species, some 10 percent of the total...The UK has some 24,000 described species, while Australian has about 75,000 named species and probably at least 100,000 that are yet to be described. (p. 41)
- The cells that make up animal bodies are, on average, the same size, regardless of the actual size of the whole animal. Each gram of animal tissue contains about 1 billion cells, so a honey bee weighing one tenth of a gram has some 100 million cells in its body. (p. 286)
- All insects begin their lives as a single fertilized cell, so the number of cell divisions that they go through during their lives is astronomical. The rate of division in the earliest life of an embryo is extremely rapid – in fruit fly embryos, one cell has become 6,000 within about three hours of fertilization.” (p. 292)
- The heaviest insect is the Little Barrier Island Giant Weta, which can weigh 2½ ounces. The longest is the extremely spindly stick insect Phryganistria chinensis, which can reach more than 24 inches length. The Hercules Beetle is the longest-bodied beetle at up to 6 2/3 inches, more than half of that length made up of its enormously long thoracic 'horn' The smallest insects are male wasps of the family Mymaridae, which can be just 0.14mm long.” (p. 324)
- There are somewhere between 10 trillion and 10,000 trillion ants alive on Earth today, making them the most abundant insect group in terms of numbers of individuals. Their total biomass is about the same as Earth’s human biomass.” (p. 327)
I’ve never considered myself a bug guy, but there is some really interesting information here. I picked up the book in part because I had read that pill bugs (aka: rolly pollys) are in fact not insects at all but the only existing terrestrial arthropods, gill-breathing distant relatives of shrimp and crayfish, with an evolutionary pedigree stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Considering that modern Homo sapiens evolved only about 300,000 years ago, those little bugs scurrying around under my garden mulch are worthy of some passing respect. Anyway, I enjoyed this book and intend to look for another by the same author: How Birds Work. I expect to be similarly entertained and informed.
September 3, 2020
A beautiful and informative book, How Insects Work is a companion piece to Taylor's How Birds Work: An Illustrated Guide. This volume covers a wealth of information about insects from appendages, wings and antennae, to chemoreception, and other senses, to reproduction, parthenogenesis, metamorphosis and instar phases. Lavishly illustrated with examples, it's an excellent book for middle grade and older children who are interested in learning about how insects actually function and how their forms have evolved to facilitate those functions. Another beautiful installment in this short series!
May 2, 2020
Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
How Insects Work is an adept and beautiful technical examination of insects and the mechanisms they have developed to interact with and survive in their various environments. Released 28th April 2020 by The Experiment, it's 224 pages and available in flexibound and ebook formats.
This isn't a field guide or just a collection of facts. Each of the entries contains isometric drawings and line art showing the engineering concepts and principles behind many of the functional physiological characteristics of different types of insects.
The layout is logical and easy to follow. The introductory chapter covers the ancient insect-like animals, the first arthropods with the family tree of modern day insects including a cool informative chapter on the carboniferous period 359 to 299 million years ago. The fossil arthropods represented include Arthropleura, a millipede that exceeded 7 feet (2m) in length! *Yikes* The following chapters "build up" structurally from the base up: the exoskeleton, movement, nervous system and sensory organs, feeding and digestion, respiratory and circulatory systems, reproduction, and more. Each is thoroughly represented, accurate, and very well illustrated and interesting. The photography and art are clear and beautifully rendered.
This would make a nice choice for all ages, entomology lovers, students of nature and biology, as well as artists and readers interested in technical drawing. Note: no drawing tutorials or instructions are included, but there are numerous well illustrated exploded drawings to study.
Five stars, very impressive.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
How Insects Work is an adept and beautiful technical examination of insects and the mechanisms they have developed to interact with and survive in their various environments. Released 28th April 2020 by The Experiment, it's 224 pages and available in flexibound and ebook formats.
This isn't a field guide or just a collection of facts. Each of the entries contains isometric drawings and line art showing the engineering concepts and principles behind many of the functional physiological characteristics of different types of insects.
The layout is logical and easy to follow. The introductory chapter covers the ancient insect-like animals, the first arthropods with the family tree of modern day insects including a cool informative chapter on the carboniferous period 359 to 299 million years ago. The fossil arthropods represented include Arthropleura, a millipede that exceeded 7 feet (2m) in length! *Yikes* The following chapters "build up" structurally from the base up: the exoskeleton, movement, nervous system and sensory organs, feeding and digestion, respiratory and circulatory systems, reproduction, and more. Each is thoroughly represented, accurate, and very well illustrated and interesting. The photography and art are clear and beautifully rendered.
This would make a nice choice for all ages, entomology lovers, students of nature and biology, as well as artists and readers interested in technical drawing. Note: no drawing tutorials or instructions are included, but there are numerous well illustrated exploded drawings to study.
Five stars, very impressive.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
September 1, 2025
My father loves insects. I read this because I wanted to be able to talk to him about something he loves. This book did not disappoint.
I knew somethings before starting to read but I think someone with no knowledge at all would still be able to pick up and understand this book. It is written at a level where it is easy to understand without being boring.
I was fascinated by what I was reading and definitely started chatting with people about metamorphosis , migrations, larva, mating. The mother termite and the feigning death to avoid mating are both great tidbits.
I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who had an interest in or wanted to learn more about insects.
I knew somethings before starting to read but I think someone with no knowledge at all would still be able to pick up and understand this book. It is written at a level where it is easy to understand without being boring.
I was fascinated by what I was reading and definitely started chatting with people about metamorphosis , migrations, larva, mating. The mother termite and the feigning death to avoid mating are both great tidbits.
I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who had an interest in or wanted to learn more about insects.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 5, 2021
Amazing! This book is so fun and informative. I'm impressed how many aspects of insects are covered by the book as well as how many different examples they have for various insects and insect families. I enjoyed this book thoroughly cover-to-cover, antenna to wings to breathing mechanisms to social behavior to mating and many other topics.
Did you know cockroaches are the only insects to give birth to live young, as well as the only insect to produce milk? This one fact was one of the most memorable topics from the book for me.
I also really enjoyed learning about the ways different bugs breath (through little holes/tubes in their bodies) and all the ways insects lay eggs - what they look for, what's important to them, etc.
I gained so much insect knowledge from this book and I will definitely be reading it again. If you have even a loose interest in insects or nature, I highly recommend this book. The pictures and diagrams are also very fun!
There were also some good topics covering the effects of climate change on bug species, causing problems and population decline for most, as well as international trade leading to invasive species and the negative effects from that.
Thank you, Marianne Taylor! Very impressive.
Did you know cockroaches are the only insects to give birth to live young, as well as the only insect to produce milk? This one fact was one of the most memorable topics from the book for me.
I also really enjoyed learning about the ways different bugs breath (through little holes/tubes in their bodies) and all the ways insects lay eggs - what they look for, what's important to them, etc.
I gained so much insect knowledge from this book and I will definitely be reading it again. If you have even a loose interest in insects or nature, I highly recommend this book. The pictures and diagrams are also very fun!
There were also some good topics covering the effects of climate change on bug species, causing problems and population decline for most, as well as international trade leading to invasive species and the negative effects from that.
Thank you, Marianne Taylor! Very impressive.
May 29, 2024
In this book, I and we learn “How Insects Work” and how we are dependent on millions of insects to live. Sure some are bad and nasty like mosquitos but millions of other insects are essential for the survival of plants and animals…and us. This excellent book gives information on insect species, anatomy, reproduction, and lifestyles. There are dragonflies, beetles, ants and bees and we need them. Insects account for about 75% of all animal life on earth. This is an excellent reference and I will use it in my volunteering at the American Museum of Natural Science Insectarium in my volunteer work.
May 28, 2023
Brilliant pictures and schematics of various insects with detailed diagrams and a plethora of various information on a large variety of different species.
If you're looking for inspiration with writing or art like I was look no further.
If you're looking for inspiration with writing or art like I was look no further.
May 7, 2020
Fondamentalmente, può sostituire un manuale se un lettore dovesse essere incuriosito dall'entomologia ma non disposto ad affrontare un volume troppo corposo e denso.
January 6, 2021
Very interesting and informative read. A great mix of detailed science and friendly delivery.
December 28, 2021
A good read with great illustraions.
May 9, 2022
Not as good as the How Birds Work book. I think ultimately the diversity of insects really worked against this book being so brief.
May 28, 2025
Fascinating book. I loved it.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews