Christmas books : … and the crawlies

Serious young students of insect behaviour will revel in the sophisticated text of Amazing Bugs by Miranda MacQuitty (Dorling Kindersley, £8.99, ISBN 0 7513 5431 1). Accuracy is all—only Hemiptera, with their piercing and sucking mouthparts, can truly be called bugs. MacQuitty pulls no punches. A gloriously gruesome picture shows how a greenfly liquefies solid food by vomiting on it. But anecdotes keep the tone light. Bet you didn’t know a cat flea could leap 34 centimetres—100 times its body length?