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How Not to Be Eaten: The Insects Fight Back, by Gilbert Waldbauer
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All animals must eat. But who eats who, and why, or why not? Because insects outnumber and collectively outweigh all other animals combined, they comprise the largest amount of animal food available for potential consumption. How do they avoid being eaten? From masterful disguises to physical and chemical lures and traps, predatory insects have devised ingenious and bizarre methods of finding food. Equally ingenious are the means of hiding, mimicry, escape, and defense waged by prospective prey in order to stay alive. This absorbing book demonstrates that the relationship between the eaten and the eater is a central—perhaps the central—aspect of what goes on in the community of organisms. By explaining the many ways in which insects avoid becoming a meal for a predator, and the ways in which predators evade their defensive strategies, Gilbert Waldbauer conveys an essential understanding of the unrelenting coevolutionary forces at work in the world around us.
- Sales Rank: #1585336 in Books
- Published on: 2012-02-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .80" w x 6.00" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Review
"At times this informative book turns wonderfully gross and lovely, reminding us that there's an entire universe of largely unnoticed creatures all around us."--"Audubon Magazine"
"For the aspiring entomologist or amateur naturalist, there is much to appreciate in Waldbauer's wonderland of astonishing behaviors and colorful creatures. And for the entomologist's friends or family who don't see what's so great about the hexapod world, this book might be just the ticket. Its vivid stories are sure to inspire a closer attention to the small, everyday dramas playing out on spider webs, on flowers and all around us."--"American Scientist"
"From burrowing owls that bait dung beetles with lures made from cow manure to the unicorn caterpillar, which sprays would-be attackers with a spritz of acid, the profusion of life in all its forms and finery flies in through the window on biology that Waldbauer opens wide."--"The Scientist"
"Readers will certainly come away with . . . appreciation for the ways in which insects use mimicry, deceit and poison to survive."--Amy Stewart"Washington Post" (03/25/2012)
"The strengths of the book derive from the author's . . . decades of experience as a keen observer of nature."--Elsa Youngsteadt"American Scientist" (05/14/2012)
"This book is a good source of information for laypeople, young students, and those who have no knowledge of the insect world."--J.M. Gonzalez"Choice" (07/01/2012)
"Fascinating. . . . "How Not To Be Eaten" is engaging in its descriptive and wide-ranging examples."--Anthony Joern, Kansas State University in Manhattan"Bioscience" (12/01/2012)
"An entertaining, informative introduction to insect defenses."--Clyde E. Sorenson"Ecology" (02/01/2013)
Readers will certainly come away with . . . appreciation for the ways in which insects use mimicry, deceit and poison to survive. --Amy Stewart"Washington Post" (03/25/2012)"
The strengths of the book derive from the author s . . . decades of experience as a keen observer of nature. --Elsa Youngsteadt"American Scientist" (05/14/2012)"
This book is a good source of information for laypeople, young students, and those who have no knowledge of the insect world. --J.M. Gonzalez"Choice" (07/01/2012)"
Fascinating. . . . "How Not To Be Eaten" is engaging in its descriptive and wide-ranging examples. --Anthony Joern, Kansas State University in Manhattan"Bioscience" (12/01/2012)"
About the Author
Gilbert Waldbauer is Professor Emeritus of Entomology at University of Illinois. He is the author of eight books, including Fireflies, Honey, and Silk (UC Press), A Walk around the Pond, and What Good Are Bugs?
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
The Insect World's Arms Race
By Rob Hardy
We have more insects, and more insect species, than any other animals. On land and in freshwater, in most places, if you weighed all the insects and all the other animals, the insects would win. Because insects are numerous and ubiquitous, they are also the largest and most reliable animal foodstuff, and though we in the west don't often snack on them (though we enjoy their cousins such as crabs), birds, spiders, scorpions, frogs, mammals and other creatures (including other insects) benefit from insects as a source of nutrition. And the insects aren't going to stand still for it. Well, some of them are, for standing still is a good protective tactic for some. It, and all the other means that insects use for protection, are detailed in _How Not to Be Eaten: The Insects Fight Back_ (University of California Press) by entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer. Waldbauer has written plenty of scientific papers, but like his valuable _What Good Are Bugs?_, this volume is a guide to help everyone appreciate insects more. Each insect is a little miracle of evolution, and they have many surprising ways of avoiding becoming someone's meal. And then their predators have evolved further means to overcome those obstacles. Waldbauer says the purpose of the ten chapters here is to "elucidate the strategies and counterstrategies in the everlasting evolutionary arms race between predators and prey." His book is beautifully organized by specific tactics.
One of the tactics is not surprising at all to anyone who has turned on a kitchen light and found a cockroach on the floor. Instantaneously, the cockroach flees (and if it is in my kitchen, it usually gets away before I can stomp on it). Fleeing is a fine tactic, and that cockroach will duck into a dark crevice before you know it. Grasshoppers and others jump, propelled by strong muscles in the back legs. Click beetles straighten their bodies out with a click and fly into the air without using leg muscles. Many insects are hidden by camouflage that is nothing exotic, like the color green for a leaf dweller, or a mottled brown for one that stays on the ground or on tree trunks. The more elaborate deceptions of camouflage can be spectacular, even witty. A caterpillar in India looks the perfect double of a bird dropping, earning praise from an observer in 1892, who was struck by "the skill with which the colouring rendered the varying surfaces, the dried portion at the top, then the main portion, moist , viscid, soft, and the glistening globule at the end. A skilled artist working with all materials at his command could not have done it better." Plenty of moths and other insects have eye spots; often the insect is camouflaged and unremarkable, but when disturbed will spread its wings to show eyespots, sometimes complete with a highlight on the "pupil." Eyespots represent a bluffing offense strategy, and insects do a lot of such bluffing. It has been shown in the lab that birds and other insect eaters can reliably recognize insects that will taste bad after trying to eat just one of them; they learn the important lesson fast. They are helped in the learning if the insect is dramatically marked with warning colors, the same bright yellows, orange, and reds that we humans use for our warning signs on the roads. So mimics take advantage of such learning; they might be tasty, but if the predator thinks they are not, they are safe. Some jet-black darkling beetles found in the desert have that black color as a warning, since they stand out on desert sands; and the warning is a true one, for when they are threatened, they stand on their heads, put their abdomens in the air, and ready themselves to spray a repellant from glands at the tip of the abdomen. But other beetles in the desert have adopted not only the black warning color, but also the headstand posture; in their case, they are bluffing, because they have no repellant glands, but the bluff works.
The tactics of the insects are clever, and the tactics of researchers trying to understand them are clever, too. Waldbauer describes many field and laboratory experiments; I did not realize that one of the problems in insect labs is cockroach infestations: "Entomologists can't use insecticides in their laboratories; insecticides kill not only cockroaches but also the insects that are the subjects of our experiments." One experiment described here involves the entomologist using a casting rod to present lizards with tethered butterflies with and without warning colors, and tallying the degree to which the lizards responded to the butterflies cast to them. There are many such experiments reported here, each adding a little bit to our understanding of the complex behavior and ecological fit of these creatures. Waldbauer's curiosity and enthusiasm is present on every page, and although insects may annoy, impoverish, or sicken us, you won't be able to read the descriptions here without admiration for their superb adaptations.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The Red Queen Principle!
By LastRanger
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
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating
By Sheila Ary
I found this book hard to put down, there was so much fascinating information, most of which was new to me. The author's style is a bit pedantic, but don't let that put you off. It is a marvelous world, unknown to most of us, that he is writing about. His information is based on scientific research, which he quotes frequently, so we know it is genuine.
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