Insects on Nettles

There is a natural tendency to avoid Stinging nettles because of their obvious unpleasant associations. However, I hope this book will convince you that nettles offer exceptional opportunities for field studies and simple experiments in ecology. In the first place, nettles are almost universally available for they grow on clay, peat and sandy soils, in grassland, woodland, heath and fen, in agricultural and waste land and around human habitations; from the coast up to 730 m (2400 ft) in the Pennines and from the Scilly Isles to the Shetlands. Secondly, Stinging nettle is a vigorous, long-lived plant which often occurs in dense stands producing a distinctive habitat which can be examined, treated and sampled in various ways: unlike many other plants, it can be readily grown from seed or rhizome (underground stem), or cut down whenever you wish, and its growth or regrowth can be measured and compared under different conditions such as the amount of shade it receives or the kind of soil it grows on. And finally, Stinging nettle sustains an extremely rich and diverse insect fauna offering a miniature world for exploration. Enough is known about these insects to point out some of their fascinating and contrasting life styles and subtle interactions, but there is much more we do not yet know. This book gives keys to the identification of about 100 species or groups of insects that regularly occur on nettle, with notes on their biology and suggested topics for study - but first a few essentials about the plant itself. There are two kinds of nettle in Britain, the common, perennial Stinging nettle Urtica dioica L. and the more local, annual Small nettle Urtica urens L. Urtica is the Latin name for nettle whilst dioica is derived from the Greek for two houses (di-oikos) and refers to the fact that this species has separate male and female plants. Since some insects favour the developing seeds on female plants and others feed on the pollen of male flowers,this distinction is important.

Author: BNK Davis
Publisher: Richmond Publishing
Extra Details: Pictorial Card Covers 6 x 9 inches tall.68 Pages.Illustrated with Colour plates and B&W line drawings throughout.NEW BOOK.