Buzz, sting, bite : why we need insects / Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson ; translated by Lucy Moffatt ; illustrations by Tuva Sverdrup-Thygeson.

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An enthusiastic, witty, and informative introduction to the world of insects and why we--and the planet we inhabit--could not survive without them.

Insects comprise roughly half of the animal kingdom. They live everywhere -- deep inside caves, 18,000 feet high in the Himalayas, inside computers, in Yellowstone's hot springs, and in the ears and nostrils of much larger creatures. There are insects that have ears on their knees, eyes on their penises, and tongues under their feet. Most of us think life would be better without bugs. In fact, life would be impossible without them.

Most of us know that we would not have honey without honeybees, but without the pinhead-sized chocolate midge, cocoa flowers would not pollinate. No cocoa, no chocolate. The ink that was used to write the Declaration of Independence was derived from galls on oak trees, which are induced by a small wasp. The fruit fly was essential to medical and biological research experiments that resulted in six Nobel prizes. Blowfly larva can clean difficult wounds; flour beetle larva can digest plastic; several species of insects have been essential to the development of antibiotics. Insects turn dead plants and animals into soil. They pollinate flowers, including crops that we depend on. They provide food for other animals, such as birds and bats. They control organisms that are harmful to humans. Life as we know it depends on these small creatures.

With ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson as our capable, entertaining guide into the insect world, we'll learn that there is more variety among insects than we can even imagine and the more you learn about insects, the more fascinating they become. Buzz, Sting, Bite is an essential introduction to the little creatures that make the world go round.

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Buzz, Sting, Bite Introduction There are more than 200 million insects for every human being living on the planet today. As you sit reading this sentence, between 1 quadrillion and 10 quadrillion insects are shuffling and crawling and flapping around on the planet, outnumbering the grains of sand on all the world's beaches. Like it or not, they have you surrounded, because Earth is the planet of the insects. There are so many of them that it's difficult to take it in, and they are everywhere: in forests and lakes, meadows and rivers, tundra and mountains. Stone flies live in the chilly heights of the Himalayas at altitudes of 20,000 feet, while brine flies live in the piping hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, where temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In the eternal darkness of the world's deepest caverns live blind cave midges. Insects can live in baptismal fonts, computers, oil puddles, and the acid and bile of a horse's stomach. They live in deserts, beneath the ice on frozen seas, in the snow, and in the nostrils of walruses. Insects live on all continents--although they are admittedly represented by only a single species on Antarctica: a flightless midge that can't survive if the temperature happens to creep up to 50 degrees for any length of time. There are even insects in the sea. Seals and penguins have in their hides various kinds of lice, which remain in place when their hosts dive beneath the surface. And we mustn't forget the lice that live in a pelican's pouch or the water striders who spend their lives scudding six-legged across the open sea. Insects may be tiny, but their achievements are far from trifling. Long before human beings set foot on this planet, insects had already taken up agriculture and animal husbandry: termites grow fungus for food, while ants keep aphids as dairy cattle. Wasps were the first creatures to make paper from cellulose, and caddis fly larvae were catching other creatures in netlike webs millions of years before we humans managed to weave our first fishing nets. Insects solved complicated problems of aerodynamics and navigation several million years ago and learned if not how to tame fire, at least how to tame light--even within their own bodies. Insects Assemble Whether we opt to count them by individual or species, there are good grounds for claiming that insects are the most successful class of animal on the planet. Not only are there incredible numbers of individual insects, they also account for well over half of all known multicellular species. They come in around a million different variants. This means that you could have an "insect of the month" calendar that featured a new species every single month for more than 80,000 years! From A to Z, insects impress with their species' richness: ants, bumblebees, cicadas, dragonflies, earwigs, fireflies, grasshoppers, honeybees, inchworms, jewel beetles, katydids, lacewings, mayflies, nits, owl moths, praying mantises, queen butterflies, rice weevils, stink bugs, termites, urania moths, velvet ants, wasps, xylophagous beetles, yellow mealworms, and zebra butterflies. Let's do a quick thought experiment: to get an impression of how species diversity is distributed among different groups of species, imagine if all the world's known species--big and small alike--were given UN membership. It would be an awfully tight squeeze in the assembly chambers, because even if there were only a single representative for every species, that would still add up to well over 1.5 million representatives. Let's say we distributed power and voting rights in this "United Nations of biodiversity" according to the number of species in the different species groups. That would create new and unusual patterns, predominantly because insects would dominate, comprising more than half of all votes. And that's before we consider all the other small species, such as spiders, snails, roundworms, and the like, which alone would account for a fifth of the votes. Next up, plant species of all kinds would total roughly 16 percent, broadly speaking, while known species of fungus and lichen would command around 5 percent of votes. Where do we fit into this picture? When we look at species diversity like this, humanity doesn't amount to much. Even if we were counted along with all the rest of the world's vertebrates--with animals such as elk and mice, fish, birds, snakes, and frogs--we would still end up with a minuscule share of power, constituting a mere 3 percent of known species diversity. In other words, we humans are totally dependent on a host of tiny species, a significant proportion of which are insects. Dwarf Fairies and Biblical Giants Insects come in all shapes and hues, spanning a range of sizes that is barely matched in any other class of animals. The world's tiniest insects, fairy wasps, live out the whole of their larval existence inside the eggs of other insects, which gives you a good idea of just how small they are. One of them, the teeny Kikiki huna wasp, is so tiny at 0.16 millimeter that you can't even see it. It takes its name from the Polynesian language spoken on Hawaii, one of the places where it is found. Logically enough, it means something like "tiny dot." A sister species among the dwarf wasps has an even prettier name. Tinkerbella nana takes its genus name from the fairy in Peter Pan, while the species name, nana, is a pun referring to both nanos, the Greek word for "dwarf," and Nana, the name of the dog in Peter Pan. The Tinkerbell wasp is so small that it can land on the tip of a human hair. It's a giant step from there to our biggest insects. There are several rivals for this title, depending on what "biggest" means. If we're talking longest, the winner is the Chinese stick insect Phryganistria chinensis Zhao: at 24.5 inches, it is longer than your forearm--but no thicker than an index finger. The subspecies was named for the entomologist Zhao Li, who spent six years of his life hunting down the super-stick insect after a tip from locals in the Guangxi region of southern China. But if we're talking about the heaviest insect, the Goliath beetle is well placed. The larvae of this African giant can weigh up to 3.5 ounces, roughly the same as a blackbird. The beetle was named after Goliath, the ten-foot-tall giant of biblical fame who struck terror into the hearts of the Israelites but was nonetheless slain by a stripling named David, aided only by a sling. The Very First Insects Predate the Dinosaurs Insects have been around for a long time, infinitely longer than us humans. It's difficult to get a proper grasp on deep time: eons and eras, millions and billions of years. So perhaps it won't mean all that much if I say that the first insects saw the light of day around 479 million years ago. Maybe it's more helpful to point out that insects saw the dinosaurs come and go, by a long margin. Once upon a time, long, long ago, the first plants and animals emerged from the sea and onto dry land. It was a revolution for life on Earth. Imagine, like Shaw in his book Planet of the Bugs, if we could have filmed that fateful moment--what an iconic video clip that would be: "One small step for bugs, one giant leap for life on Earth." Unfortunately, we'll have to settle for tracking the entrepreneurs of the insect world using fossils and our own fertile imagination. Think back to the earth's earliest days. A few million years have passed since the first adventurous bugs poked their heads out of the sea and decided to check out new, drier neighborhoods. We are in the Devonian period, somewhat anonymously sandwiched between two better-known eras, the Cambro-Silurian period (consisting of the Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian periods) and the Carboniferous period (the very basis of our oil-addicted society, with all its attendant wealth and climate change). Evolution has shifted into top gear, and the first insect is now a fact: down there on the ground amid the bracken and the plants shaped like crow's feet shuffles a tiny six-legged creature with three body segments and two small antennae. It is the planet's first-ever insect, taking the first tiny steps toward total world domination by its kind. The close interaction between insects and other life forms was crucial from their very first day on dry land. Land plants improved the life chances of insects and other bugs by providing them with sustenance up there on the stony, barren earth. In return, the bugs improved the plants' life chances by recycling the nutrition in dead plant tissue and creating soil for new growth. The Wonder of Wings One important reason for insects' enormous success is that they can fly. What a fantastic innovation that must have been sometime around 400 million years ago! Now insects had access to something unique: equipped with wings, they could reach the nutrition in the plants more efficiently while simultaneously avoiding earthbound enemies. For the more adventurous, wings offered brand-new opportunities to disperse to new pastures. Access to airspace also influenced choice of partner, giving insects undreamed-of opportunities to flaunt their best features in new sky-high pickup joints. We don't know exactly when wings first developed. Perhaps they evolved from outgrowths on the thoracic area that may have served as solar collectors or a means of stabilizing the body after a jump or a fall. Perhaps the wings evolved from gills. Regardless, the most important point is that insects discovered that those gadgets of theirs were perfect for gliding down from trees or high plants. Insects with well-developed wing nubs got more food, lived longer, and as a result had more offspring, which, in turn, inherited the super-wing nubs. In this way, evolution ensured that wings became commonplace, and at a pretty rapid rate, too, in the context of geological timescales. Soon the air was alive with all manner of shimmering, whirring wings. One point is crucial to understanding how wildly successful wings were for the early insects: nothing else could fly! There were not yet any birds, bats, or pterosaurs, and they would be a long time coming. That meant that insects had global dominance of the air for more than 150 million years. In comparison, our own species, Homo sapiens, has spent a total of just 200,000 short years on the planet. Insects have survived five rounds of mass extinction. The dinosaurs first staggered out into the world after the third of those, around 240 million years ago. So next time you catch yourself thinking how irritating an insect is, bear in mind that this animal class has been on the planet since long before the dinosaurs. That alone merits a little respect, if you ask me. Excerpted from Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

It's rare that we stop to consider the amazing world of insects, unless we swat a mosquito or briefly marvel at a butterfly. Sverdrup-Thygeson (conservation biology, Norwegian Univ. of Life Sciences) leads readers on a fascinating journey through the class Insecta, introducing us to the creatures whose numbers comprise half of the animal kingdom. Insects are ancient; they have survived all five mass extinction events. The author delves into insect anatomy and classification, reminding us that spiders, millipedes, mites, and daddy longlegs are not insects. Sverdrup-Thygeson continues by exploring the many fantastic characteristics of insects. They can see both ultraviolet and polarized light; they practice agriculture; they contain as much protein as beef, without the fat; and they help to solve crimes. Cockroaches can even be used to search for survivors in collapsed buildings. The dung beetle symbolized a god in ancient Egypt, but today our actions are threatening at least a quarter of all insects with extinction. We may not choose to worship insects, the author explains, but we should choose to protect them. VERDICT Appropriate for all readers, in particular those who are concerned about our planet and the creatures with which we share it.--Rachel Owens, Daytona State Coll. Lib., FL

Publishers Weekly Review

Conservation biologist Sverdrup-Thygeson exudes an infectious enthusiasm for all things entomological in this curiosity-provoking primer. She presents a series of short, mostly self-contained, accounts of insect behavior, often emphasizing their connection to the larger world, grouped into such chapters as "Six-Legged Sex: Dating, Mating and Parenting," "Eat or Be Eaten: Insects in the Food Chain," and "From Silk to Shellac: Industries of Insects." Moffatt's translation readily conveys Sverdrup-Thygeson's enjoyment of her subject, with playful and evocative descriptions and an amused tone-the long, bundled-up sperm of the male Drosophila bifurca fruit fly, at full length "20 times as long as the creature itself," resembles "what happens when the kids make dinner and forget to put enough water into the spaghetti pan." Stressing the sheer number of different insect species, she observes that entomologists have named newly discovered ones after pop music stars (the Beyoncé horsefly), and Harry Potter characters (the Ampulex dementor wasp). A short final chapter explicitly about conservation raises concerns while still maintaining a light touch. Sverdrup-Thygeson's unforced humor and ability to quickly highlight salient information makes this a perfect selection for science-loving teenage readers as well as adults. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Insects are vital to the quality of life. They play essential roles in feeding, clothing, and cleaning up after people with recycling services for biota from aasvogel to Ziziphus. In this informative and engaging narrative, Sverdrup-Thygeson (Norwegian Univ. of Life Sciences) promiscuously weaves together other creatures, events, tragedies, and triumphs with a seamless scholarly integrity that misleads the unwary to think they are being entertained rather than educated. Insects, coffee beans, and civets? Insects and survival of the original Declaration of Independence? Toothsome timber? Crisis with dung down under? Insects, phonograph records, dinosaur preservation, and skin care for fruit? A horsefly and Beyoncé's derrière? Tantric sex that lasts for more than seven weeks!? Homicide, a radiator, and insects solve a case? Darwin, speciation, and irony? Preserving endangered species and eradicating wanton killers of humans--who decides what? This is pithy science, pleasantly presented with honest alacrity to enlist the public to debate serious matters as well as enjoy these small wonders of the world--a world that is not "ours" but on loan for a while. This book should be read and thought about. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Marvin K. Harris, emeritus, Texas A&M University

Booklist Review

Insects outnumber humans by billions, yet their lives and ecological importance often pass by unremarked. Sverdrup-Thygeson, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, offers a lively introduction to the six-legged creatures that share our planet, while making the case that their survival is inextricably linked to ours. The author possesses an infectious enthusiasm for the bugs she profiles and manages to imbue every maxilla and mating habit with wonder. This book explores the basic elements that comprise an insect's life (what they are, what they eat, how they reproduce), marveling equally at the ingenuity of the bumblebee as at the medicinal value of the maggot. Insects decompose plant waste and return nutrients to the soil; they spin silk six times stronger than steel; and they offer models for scientists seeking to prolong life, enter stasis, and even break down human-created waste as fast as we produce it. Ably translated by Moffatt, Buzz, Sting, Bite will foster affection for its winged, creeping, and crawling subjects, even among its most bug-shy readers.--Jenny Hamilton Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A fun introduction to the world of insects.They have existed for some 479 million years; have (mostly) six legs, four wings, two antennae, and a three-segment body; make up over half of known multicellular species; and number 200 million for every single human being living on the planet today. Indeed, we live on the planet of insects, and Sverdrup-Thygeson (Conservation Biology/Norwegian Univ. of Life Sciences) brings it to life in this sharp, good-humored presentation. Why are there so many insects? "Put simply: because they are small, supple, and sexy." It also helps that they can live nearly anywhere, including ice, hot springs, deep in caves, high on mountains, in baptismal fonts, and even your nostrils. The range of species runs from the tinkerbell wasp, which can land on the tip of a human hair and hardly make a disturbance, to the Chinese walking stick, which grows up to 2 feet in length. Insects are a fascinating topic, and the author milks their peculiarities for all they are worth: molting and metamorphosis, communication through scent, tasting with feet, seeing with knees, and listening through ears in their mouths. But the curios are only part of the bigger picture that situates insects in the great schemes of pollination, decomposition, soil formation, food for other creatures, keeping harmful organisms in check, dispersing seed, and even demonstrating solutions to problems that humans can adopt. In other words, insects could get along happily without humans, but humans could not survive without insects. The author's panoptic investigation keeps the narrative fully engaging as she alternates between anecdotes about specific insectsthe aggressive mimicry of the spotted predatory katydid, the cicadas that "dig their way downdown into seventeen years of darkness"to richly telling slices of sciencee.g., the causes of decline in insect numbers.A classy and brightly informative appreciation of insectsall you could ask for in a popular natural history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.