Super Fly – the unexpected lives of the world’s most successful insects
Jonathan Balcombe
Penguin, 2021
Unashamedly a popular-science book, Super Fly begins with the author’s acknowledgement that flies are more widely disliked than any other group of animals except, perhaps, cockroaches. The rest of the book is basically a really good attempt to remedy that situation.
The flies we find annoying, yucky, or both are a tiny minority of an enormous and incredibly diverse family, as Balcombe says. Adult flies’ lifestyles range from parasitic and predatory to pollinatory, and their immature stages (yes, including maggots) are just as diverse.
I could say more but instead I will just recommend the book and post a gallery of a few of the flies I have photographed here in North Queensland. They are a fairly random selection so I have simply arranged them from smallest to largest; click on any of them for a full-size slideshow, as usual.
population collapse
The Insect Crisis – the fall of the tiny empires that run the world
Oliver Millman
Atlantic, 2022
The worldwide collapse of insect populations is something that has worried scientists for a decade or two and is now slowly making its way into public awareness, much as climate change did.
Its effects are likely to be every bit as horrific as global warming, too, if we continue to lose our pollinators and recyclers. The insect apocalypse also resembles global warming in that it was well under way before anyone noticed, and in that it is something we have inflicted on ourselves out of ignorance, short-sightedness and greed.
Super Fly is a good book of its kind but The Insect Crisis is much better and more important. It really deserves a full review. This one in The Guardian says roughly what I would have said myself, while the author’s own site has a good introduction to the book and a few kind words from environmental scientists.
My favourite idea in The Insect Crisis is what Millman calls the “Inaction Plan” to help reverse the collapse of insect populations: let grass and weeds grow, flower and go to seed whenever and wherever you can. They will feed all sorts of insects, and some of the insects will, in turn, feed the birds. It’s a call for re-wilding, but at the smallest and most local scale.
Also in this series
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- Naturalists’ Bookshelf 1: Plants
- Naturalist’s Bookshelf 2: Braby’s Butterflies
- Lloyd Neilsen’s bird books is really part of the series, too, although not named as such.