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Alien Worlds

The Secret Lives of Insects

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About this listen

An ambitious account of the evolution and biology of insects.

Insects are the most successful group of animals ever to have lived. They comprise a million species and perhaps 10 quintillion individuals: one in every four animals on the planet is a beetle; one in every ten is a butterfly or moth. Much of life on earth depends on the activities of these busy, teeming arthropods, from pollination to the breaking down of waste matter.

In Alien Worlds, Steve Nicholls draws on a lifetime of writing about, photographing and filming the natural world to create an ambitious account of insect evolution and biology. Each chapter of Alien Worlds centers on one or more of the traits of insect life that have allowed them to hold dominion over the earth's terrestrial and freshwater environments for so long, from their staggering reproductive ability to their complex partnership with flowering plants, and from their remarkable level of care for their young to their sophisticated social lives.

Alien Worlds explores what insects are, and why there are so many of them; the impact on insects (the only flying invertebrates) of the possession of wings; and the extraordinary sensory world of insects.

©2023 Steve Nicholls (P)2023 Head of Zeus Animals Biological Sciences Outdoors & Nature Science
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If you didnt love insects already you will be the end of this book. I absolutely loved the content of this book! I learned so much. I have shared many fun facts with friends and family, in a hope to spread the appreciation for these amazing creatures who deserve a lot more recognition. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone!
This book was wonderfully narrated, however I'd reccomend reading it in print if possible. It is difficult to catch the full latin name for the insects, which makes it difficult to look up the insects you hear about to find out more about them. And apparently the hard copy has images which you do not get access to with the audio.
Lastly there were a few funny pronunciations of Afrikaans words, mainly "Gemsbok" and "heuweltjies".

Wonderous and Informative

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This book is full of fascinating and detailed entomological observations and theories. I enjoyed the accounts of the evolution of flight, migration and eusociality. However the experience is marred by the jarring mispronunciation of multiple important technical and foreign language terms (e.g. chitin with a soft 'ch' and mopane with the last 'e' unsounded). This could have been corrected with greater care on the part of the narrator and or editor.

Fascinating Content but Poor Reading

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