Reddit reviews Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity: With a Photographic Guide to Insects of Eastern North America
We found 10 Reddit comments about Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity: With a Photographic Guide to Insects of Eastern North America. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
As far as I know, Borror & Delong's Introduction to the Study of Insects is the go-to ordinal key.
You'll need to seek out other resources to narrow it down further, though. There's a lot of bugs out there and they all look alike. Stephen Marshall's Insects is also an excellent one to have lying around. It's full of photos and that's a quick-n-dirty way to help you narrow your ID down (I'd advise against relying on its arachnids section, however).
If you live in eastern North America, I highly recommend Stephen Marshall's Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity. It has a brief written overview for each insect order, and is filled with tons of captioned color photos showcasing common or interesting species. It's basically a mega field guide, so don't expect a huge amount of written discussion, but I love my copy so much!
Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity by Stephen Marshall is a rather large book that gives some information on each of the orders of insects. Following the write-ups there are many pictures detailing the various families among each order with descriptions about those families. Then, toward the end of the book there is a dichotomous key that can be used to ID insects to family.
That is what was recommended in my introductory entomology class for identification, but the bulk of what I learned was from lecture materials that aren't commercially available. Hopefully other folks here might have a good idea for other books/media!
I have a fondness for this one.
I don't have any sort of classroom education on entomology or biology for that matter, but it's like a veritable textbook.
It covers a fair bit of anatomy and I thought it did a pretty good job of discussing the evolution of insects.
Personally I'm a big fan of Steve Marshall's book:
http://www.amazon.com/Insects-Natural-History-Diversity-Photographic/dp/1552979008
It's well written in plain english, with tons and tons of pictures. I found it extremely easy to read when I was first getting into entomology, yet very accurate and informative. Covers all the major families you're likely to run into, and works well as a field guide too (except it weighs a ton!).
Plus, since it's not technically a textbook, it's relatively cheap.
Same here. I just used my old entomology textboook, Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity, which is one of the best textbooks I've ever bought. They have a limited section on non-insect arthropods and the Dimorphic Jumping Spider was the closest match I could find.
I also moved mobile homes a couple times out in Bedford as a summer job this year and saw a few of these guys. There were False Black Widows all over the place, but I had these spiders and Bold Jumpers crawling over me all day, too.
Yes! Definitely need multiple sources. I usually don't use more then one field guide though. I use the field guy mentioned above, Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity by Marshall and then bugguide as another source. Marshall has an interesting key and a great set of photo references.
The best thing you can do is become familiar with the terminology. This book was useful for looking up various nomenclatures on certain body parts or regions, like which veins are which on wings. Otherwise This book had some good keys in it, but it's primarily description based, and many other keys I've used beyond it are this way as well. For the book, it was convenient that it had many pictures to reference in earlier chapters if you wanted some visual confirmation you were on the right path in the key. Otherwise, I'd suggest getting with the professor and asking for sources they might suggest to become better with the terminology.
The keys I've used with as many pictures as descriptions were constrained to species-level ID of one insect. There might be some sources you can find with some internet searches, though those aren't so easy to find all the time.
Bugguide.net might be a resource you can consider, though it doesn't act as a key, and is more useful if you are already familiar with the different types of insects and their classifications.
I'd like to add that you should definitely get a field guide to insects that is relevant to your area. Being able to ID what you catch at least to order or family will make the whole thing more enjoyable and will help you learn what you are catching. If you can afford it this is a FANTASTIC book with a ton of photos that is appropriate to your area.
Here are a few to get you started, some maybe be textbooks or textbook like, but they're incredibly informative:
Insects:
(http://smile.amazon.com/Insects-Natural-History-Diversity-Photographic/dp/1552979008/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413144193&sr=1-12&keywords=insect+evolution)
Evolution: