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What exactly is our relationship with insects? Are they more beneficial or harmful? What role do they play in the world? What are the effects of climate change: Will the number of insects continue to increase? This book discusses the beneficial and harmful effects of insects and explains their development and significance for biodiversity. This second, fully reviewed and enlarged, edition provides new insights, especially about the value of specific insect species that are generally seen as pests (e.g. ants and moths), as well as an extended chapter on the development of insects and especially their decline in different regions in the world, the industrialized countries in particular. Numerous info graphics show connections between changes in the environment due to human expansion and the number of insects and species. Studies from the US, Canada, Asia, Africa, Europe and Switzerland are used to point out the dramatic reduction of biodiversity. New tables illustrate these developments. The glossary as well as the insects index is extended, the text, tables, pictures and graphs provide even more well-rounded image. Readers will find the argumentation even more clearly and detailed.

This book discusses the beneficial and harmful effects of insects and explains their development and significance for biodiversity.Threatening pests or threatened beneficials? Biting midges are wonderful insects. The animals are so tiny and uniquely shaped that they are particularly good at pollinating the small and tight flowers of the cocoa tree. Without them, there would be much less chocolate. We associate other insects more with the damage that they cause. Mosquitoes and wasps bite us. Moth larvae damage textiles and contaminate foods. Ants undermine our paths and flies are just a pain.But what exactly is our relationship with insects? Are they more beneficial or harmful? What role do they play in the world? What are the effects of climate change: Will the number of insects continue to increase?

This “fact-filled and amusing trek through nature's dark side” (Kirkus Reviews) reveals the fascinating, weird, and often perverted ways that Mother Nature fends only for herself.It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin (host of the Animal Planet's TV show Monsters Inside Me) explains, it's also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our tour guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless. Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be. From slothful worms that hide in your body for up to thirty years to wrathful snails with poisonous harpoons that can kill you in less than five minutes to lustful ducks that have orgasms faster than you can blink, these fascinating accounts reveal the candid truth about “gentle” Mother Nature's true colors. Riskin's passion for the strange and his enthusiastic expertise bring Earth's most fascinating fauna and flora into vivid focus. Through his adventures—which include sliding on his back through a thick soup of bat guano just to get face-to-face with a vampire bat, befriending a parasitic maggot that has taken root in his head, and coming to grips with having offspring of his own—Riskin makes unexpected discoveries not just about the world all around us but also about the ways this brutal world has shaped us as humans and what our responsibilities are to this terrible, wonderful planet we call home.

Humans may have reached the top of the food chain, but the world is still teeming with apex predators who retain the advantage in their own environments, and sometimes venture into ours, especially when they have gained a taste for human blood. Survivors, hunters, and witnesses recall first-hand accounts of hair-raising, fatal encounters with massive and dangerous beasts of the wild, describing the often rapid and unstoppable series of events that result in devastation and serve to bolster the legends of the world's flesh-hungry maneaters.Relentless wolves and rogue elephants, swarms of fire ants and vicious sharks, ruthless panthers, grizzly bears, crocodiles, and even human cannibals—all have taken their toll on unsuspecting travelers.

In the Teeth of Solomon.