Book Review: Insects Do the Strangest Things

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Insects Do the Strangest Things


Author: Leonora & Arthur Hornblow

Date: 1968

Publisher Random House

ISBN: none

Length: 60 pages

Illustrations: color drawings by Michael K. Frith

Quote: "The dragonfly does not look like a dragon. It does not look like a fly. It looks like a pretty little airplane."

This book has no introduction. It hardly needs one. The first paragraph is typical of what's in Insects Do the Strangest Things: fun facts about insects, written to challenge primary school readers.

Children of all ages (as well as adults) like fun facts, so this book and its companions, Birds Do the Strangest Things and Fish Do the Strangest Things, may be good choices for older readers as well. They're excellent choices for older siblings who like, or can be persuaded, to read aloud to preschoolers.

At the time of publication, this book also deserved commendation for not encouraging children to kill moths, butterflies, and beetles for their collections. As I recall, all the other nature books I had at this time, if they mentioned insects other than honeybees, told us how to kill the insects and display the bodies. It's possible for country children to acquire an impressive collection of moths and butterflies without killing anything, but now even no-kill collections are out of fashion because their popularity encouraged people to kill too many specimens that should have been allowed to live and multiply.

However, before sharing this book with children, parents may want to make up their minds about the ethics involved in filling a bottle with fireflies to use as a lamp. (When we read this book, my parents asked my brother and me how we would like to be trapped in a bottle.)

Insects Do the Strangest Things also encourages children to try keeping a praying mantis as a pet. This is definitely preferable to trying to control nuisance insects with poison sprays, which damage the environment and may cause allergies and/or build up toxicity in humans. Mantids, like their biological "cousins" in the roach and cricket families, often seem completely unafraid of humans. They can be trained to approach a human and beg for food treats. Bold, cleverer than many insects but none too bright, some of them even seem to enjoy having their backs stroked. Unlike roaches and crickets, mantids eat only other living insects, so they don't spread diseases...but parents may want to make a decision before a child decides to want a mantis for a pet.

Mantis egg cases are often sold for organic pest control. They work best if the eggs are kept at natural light and temperature conditions, in a safe place from which the baby mantids can move right back outdoors as soon as they hatch. Mantis hatchlings don't just eat the eggshells; if not exposed to other prey fast they'll eat each other.

A fun fact not discussed in the chapter on dragonflies is that some species of dragonflies, as well as mantids and paper wasps, like to be around humans because they eat all the insects that annoy humans. The old superstition that dragonflies will use their needle-shaped bodies to sew up someone's ears or nose may have started when people observed how often dragonflies perch on a human's ear or nose. Although few humans enjoy being perched on by dragonflies, the dragonflies do this in order to catch and eat flies, gnats, and mosquitoes.

Most of the insects discussed in this book are harmless, enjoyable species, but the book does discuss flies, mosquitoes, ants, and fleas (although technically fleas aren't insects). Neutrality is maintained. The Hornblows leave it up to parents to tell children whether spraying insects is ever justifiable.

However, enjoying the fun facts in Insects Do the Strangest Things may be a good preparation for a Green child to grow up interested in encouraging insect predators rather than trying to poison insects.