“Spiders of the World: A Natural History” edited by Norman I. Platnick

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Rating: 4/5 Stars

A lovely book about the natural history of spiders. Packed full of information about spiders, it starts off with an introduction to what is a spider and what differentiates it from other spider-like organisms (like harvestmen, scorpions and so on). It then goes into some biology of spiders, then the classification of spiders.

The book then introduces some specific spiders from different families, describing their physical appearance and what we know about their behaviour (hunting, hiding, mating, etc.) and their geographical range.

Detailed pictures of the spiders are also provided, some of which are of spiders that are tiny: less than 1 mm in size. That might give you an idea of how dedicated some spider researcher must be, to seek out and try to understand such tiny organisms.

A good book to read to get to know some of the spiders in the world. General readers are free to skip over some of the more technical descriptions about spider anatomy and biology, which would interest those who want to know more about the spiders shown in the book.

Book read from 2023/06/25 to 2023/06/30