About this book

I wrote about arthropods more than once before I realized that I had more than a passing interest in them. Cabinet of Curiosities includes a chapter that describes five insects (ant, dung beetle, ladybug, monarch butterfly, and dragonfly. Extinct animals has a chapter on extinct bugs of the British Isles and a chapters on arthropods from all over. The book of science describes arthropods of the Burgess shale, Batesian and Müllerian mimicry of butterflies and moths, ants, and includes drawings of a trilobite, a flea, a bumblebee, and a fruitfly.

In an attempt to focus on the features of arthropods that matter to us the most, I have organized this book by features, not by creatures.

The cover illustration depicts an earwig, Hemimerus hanseni, from Manual of Entomology by Maxwell Lefroy.

Sources

Most of the topics below link to Wikipedia.org, which is a great resource for learning about arthropods.

• What is an arthropod?
  • “List of bilateral animal orders”
  • “Arthropod”
  • “Insect”
  • “Arachnid”
  • “Myriapoda”
  • “Crustacean”
• Arthropod morphology
  • “Arthropod Structure & Development”
  • “Arthropod exoskeleton”
  • “Resilin”
  • “Thorax (insect anatomy)”
  • “Arthropod leg”
  • “Insect morphology”
  • “Arthropod head problem”
  • “Decapod anatomy”
  • “Insect wing”
  • “Arthropod mouthparts”
  • “Insect mouthparts”
  • “Book lung”
• Arthropod senses
  • “‘Hairy’ Insects and Spiders: Spurs, Spines, Setae, and Sensilla,” by Ray Dessy
  • “Types of Antennae,” American Museum of Natural History
  • “How Many Eyes Does a Spider Have?” 28 October 2014, Karen
  • “Insect senses,” by David Darling
  • “Arthropod”
  • “Ocelli or eye spots”
  • “Arthropod eye”
  • “Spider anatomy”
  • “Compound eye”
  • “Antenna”
  • “Johnston’s organ”
  • “Chordotonal organ”
• Arthropod life cycles
  • “Reproductive system and life cycle,” Encyclopædia Britannica
  • “Spermatophore”
  • “Holometabolism”
  • “Hemimetabolism”
  • “The Blobby, Dazzling World of Insect Eggs,” Atlas Obscura
  • “Monarch butterfly”
  • “Monarch Butterfly Life Cycle,” Learn about Nature - Monarch Butterfly
• Aquatic arthropods
  • “Crustacean”
  • “Decapod anatomy”
  • “How Do Crustaceans Breathe?” Sciencing
  • “Biramous and uniramous”
  • “Antenna”
  • “Mandible”
  • “Gonopod”
  • “Uropod”
  • “Caridoid escape reaction”
  • “Remipedia”
  • “Resilin”

Links and shortcuts

In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.

• Each entry in the contents links to the poem.
• The title for a poem links back to the contents, highlighting the entry for the poem.
• Words in the headers and footers link to the index, the chapter in the contents, a listing of books by the author, to this page, and to the previous and next poems in the book.

You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).

Keyboard shortcuts for navigating this book

Context	Keys	Jump to / Behavior
cover	⌥ ◄	Books by Tom Sharp
	⌥ ▲	About Tom Sharp
	⌥ ►	about this book (this page)
	⌥ ▼	contents
	⇧ ⌥ ▼	contents
contents	⇧ ⌥ ▲	cover
	⌥ ▼	select the next item in the contents
	⌥ ▲	select the previous item in the contents
	⌥ ►	open the selected page
	⌥ ⏎	open the selected page
poem	⇧ ⌥ ▲	contents
	⌥ ◄	contents
	⌥ ▲	open the previous page
	⌥ ▼	open the next page

The poet

Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).

You may email tom/AT/liztomsharp/DOT/-c-o-m-/ to share comments on this work.