United States
£ GBP
This book presents a selection of insects seen in Mahausakande, part of a rainforest regeneration project managed by the Ellawala Foundation Trust. Its purpose is to highlight the beauty (albeit sometimes bizarre) of this group of animals, as well as to focus on their importance to humans, as an initial step towards creating awareness about this group of little appreciated fauna in a regenerating forest.
This book attempts to fulfil this task using photographs of insects captured from a naturally regenerating forest dedicated to conservation, featuring rare and exclusive colour photographs of more than 100 different types of insects frequenting the Mahausakande forest. Many of these are too small to be seen by the naked eye, but seen through the keen eyes of the skilful photographer, they are brought to life by the power of the camera lens. These pages — depicting moments in the life of insects — starts with one of the most ancient groups, dragonflies, and moves through, following an evolutionary order, to the most evolved from this group — bees, wasps and ants. The text provides a concise overview of the distinguishing features of the different insect groups, where they live, what they feed on and their roles in the forest ecosystem. Technical terms, the use of which could not be avoided, are explained and presented in bold face, and also defined in a glossary at the end of the book.
The foreword presents the background story to the regeneration of Mahausakande, and the conservation efforts that have helped reduce most of the threats that insects would encounter elsewhere, as a consequence of human activities.
