Did you know that the weevil is the most successful family of the animal kingdom, with over 50,000 species? Or that there is a kind of bug that looks and acts a lot like a crocodile? This book is full of unbelievable information!
    In the first section you’ll meet caterpillars with chrysalids that look like shrivelled leaves and other unbelievable examples of camouflage. The second section is about mimicry. There’s a bug known as “the toad bug” that looks and jumps just like a frog.
    What I like most about the book are the bright, detailed photos. What I like least are some explanations of mimicry, they’re confusing. The language is advanced and technical, so it’s not exactly “easy reading”.
    I learned a lot from this book. One thing I learned about was “automimicry”. An example of this is that some spiders actually make dummies that look almost exactly like themselves, and they sometimes lay eggs in them! They assemble the fakes around their webs, so that if a spider made six dummies, it would have six out of seven chances of escape if the web was attacked.
    I had fun reading the amazing facts in the book, but some of it was a bit boring, like the summaries of each chapter.
    If I could change anything about the book, I would make it a little more kid-friendly. I would also rearrange some of the photo captions so that you could tell which photo they explained.
    My overall impression of the book was that it was informative. Out of 10, I give it a score of 8.

(Originally published in the Sept/Oct 2003 issue of YES Mag.)