Volume 51, Number 4 · March 11, 2004
Flaming Creatures
By Tim Flannery
For Love of Insects
by Thomas Eisner
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 448 pp., $29.95
One evening in 1966 near Lake Placid, Florida, one of North America's most beautiful moths flew into the web of a great orb-weaving spider. Trapped moths usually struggle desperately to escape, but this magenta-hued beauty, its wings boldly spotted with black-in-white bull's eyes, lay unperturbed as the spider crept ever nearer. When it reached the moth, instead of delivering a killing bite, the spider hesitated for a moment, and then gently cut by turn each of the silken threads holding the insect, until it fluttered free.
Review, 2919 words
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