Amazing Arachnids

Description

A richly illustrated and up-close look at the secret lives of spiders and other arachnids The American Southwest is home to an extraordinary diversity of arachnids, from spitting spiders that squirt silk over their prey to scorpions that court one another with kissing and dancing. Amazing Arachnids presents these enigmatic creatures as you have

Jillian Cowles is a clinical microbiologist, naturalist, and photographer. Her photographs have appeared in numerous books and publications, including The Bees in Your Backyard and Bugs Rule! (both Princeton), as well as museum displays, art exhibits, and murals.

"This book is in line to win the Greg Laden's Blog Science Book of the Year. It looks like a high quality, almost coffee table like, book on the arachnids, things like mites and spiders and such. But that is only what it appears to be on the surface. Just below the surface, it is a compendium of evolutionary amazingness, a detailed description of the photogenic history, behavioral biology, and co-evolution of plants and animals, with almost all the protagonists in the numerous loosely connected stories being one sort or another of amazing arachnid."---Greg Laden, Greg Laden's Blog "If you are as fond of or fascinated by all things eight legged as Cowles, then Amazing Arachnids is the book for you."---Roberta Gibson, Wild About Ants "I'm not an arachnid specialist, but I found her treatment of even the most obscure arachnid subgroups to be original, readable, and richly detailed."---Stephen A. Marshall, Canadian Field-Naturalist "Amazing Arachnids is an ambitious text, introducing the biology of nearly all arachnid orders with an emphasis on basic taxonomy and reproductive behavior. This is one of the few volumes to treat arachnids as a whole, including mites and ticks, which are often and unfortunately segregated into their own discipline . . . . I hope this book finds its audience and opens more eyes to the weird and wonderful world of the arachnids."---Eric Yip, The Quarterly Review of Biology