Being a work focusing “on spiders likely to be spotted in Maine [but] by no means comprehensive,” Wilde presents clearly written and informative profiles – accompanied by very useful images, primarily from his own camera – of forty-two species, as well as a number of additional genera, of spider that anyone may reasonably expect to find in the course of exploring the natural world throughout the Pine Tree State.
One of the challenges of being a general naturalist – particularly a self-taught one – is that of establishing a sturdy foundation in all, or at least most, of the major areas of nature study. For those who undertake any formal, institutionally guided study in one of the fields, such a foundation is provided in […]
I’ll be honest, having read Dr. Eleanor Spicer Rice’s four books about ants and found them to be absolutely brilliant, I may have actually squealed (in a manly, dignified way, of course) with glee upon learning of the publication by University of Chicago Press of her new “Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Spiders.”
With the exception of ants, it’s difficult to imagine an arthropod more colonial than bees. However in thinking of bees this way, we all-to-often forget that not all bees are colonial. In Britain and Ireland, for example, there are approximately ten times more species of solitary bee than bumblebee and honeybee species combined.