Jungle Bugs: Masters of Camouflage and Mimicry

Front Cover
Firefly Books, 2003 - 144 pages

During roughly 400 million years on this planet, one million species of insects have developed with a great diversity of shape and color to protect them from predators.

Bruce Purser spent years traveling through tropical forests studying insects and photographing their ongoing quest for survival as they blended into tree trunks and imitated sticks, leaves, other bugs, and even bird droppings. Taken in exotic locales including French Guyana, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, Kenya, Morocco, and Venezuela, his dazzling photographs are accompanied by thoughtful text as he traces the insects' efforts to hide from or scare off their predators.

In this charming and informative book:

  • Explore the dangerous and little-known world of insects
  • Experience exotic tropic tours
  • Discover animal behavior in lively and understandable language
  • Find out how a good disguise or a good impersonation can make the difference between life and death in the animal world

Stunning color photographs reveal insect secrets that we would never get a chance to observe ourselves: such as a harmless moth that looks exactly like a stinging wasp or an inoffensive butterfly that's protected from predators because its coloring is almost identical to that of a highly poisonous variety.

 

Contents

The Nature of Insect Disguise
15
Passive Camouflage
21
Evolutionary convergence
38
Protective transparency
46
Habitats
107
Glossary
132
Sources
138
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Bruce Purser spent the first ten years of his life on a sheep farm in New Zealand where he developed his lifelong fascination with insects. He trained as a geologist, which led him to the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. He visited many tropical forests, notably those of South America. In the 1970s he moved from collecting insects to photographing them.

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