Of Cockroaches and Crickets

This deep dive into the fascinating, icky, beautiful, gruesome, and incredible world of insects teaches us to love the inconspicuous, disgusting, and annoying creatures all around us.

Whether he’s telling stories of gilding the rear ends of cockroaches in gold to study them under a microscope, setting up tape recorders in the depths of the Amazon rainforest to document the sounds of crickets, renting a troupe of giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches to a local film company, or fighting off a swarm of Ecuadorian army ants with only a broom and a prayer, Nischk’s tales are charming, incredible, and come from a lifetime of enthusiasm for bugs.

And as Nischk introduces us to the wonders and horrors of this fascinating, terrible world, he narrates stories and discoveries from throughout the history of entomology—predatory wasps that hunt and paralyze live crickets to feed their larvae, zombie fungi that invade and take over the brains of ants, cockroaches disguised as ladybugs to avoid insect-eating bats, and blue damselflies who lay their eggs underwater by encasing themselves in a bubble of oxygen. He introduces us to species as wide-ranging as the whip spider, whose bodies are larger than the human hand and the bullet ant, whose bite is excruciatingly painful, and he explains why the difference between red-legged and green-legged grasshoppers in a region of Ecuador might be of special interest to evolutionary historians.

Nischk also examines threats to biodiversity and profiles conservation efforts around the world to protect species as wide-ranging as the spectacled bear, cock-of-the-rock, giant antpitta, and olingo. In doing so, he speaks of our need to learn to love what we most need to protect for the sake of future generations, and shows why conservation initiatives can have strong economic, as well as ecological, benefits.

Brimming with fascinating facts, incredible stories, and unbelievable anecdotes, and answering the age-old question of whether a cockroach would survive a nuclear apocalypse, Of Cockroaches and Crickets will intrigue anyone who has ever loved—or hated!—the tiny, seemingly unlikable creatures all around us.