African Wildlife & Environment Issue 79

GOOD READS

Bombylid fly (Photograph: Hennie de Klerk)

is emeritus professor at the University of Pretoria. He teaches undergraduates, supervises postgraduates and continues his research work, while he and Jenny live on a remote farm in the Karoo. The photographs in this book are superb, and apart from a few, are the work on Hennie de Klerk, a retired metallurgist who has devoted his life to insect photography and the extraordinary possibilities that now are available through digital photography. Jenny talks about the ideas they had for the design of the book: "I had a very specific idea about the layout for the book even before we wrote the first word. I worked at SANBI in the Publications Department for a short while, where I reviewed and uploaded various natural history books to their Bookshop website and was privileged to see some really wonderful layouts. By combining these I came up with the idea for 'PPP'. I liked the idea of using ‘text boxes’ to highlight interesting facts – or as a means for including ‘stories’ that did not exactly fit into the narrative of the particular chapter.

Ecological regions are characterised by particular climates, soils and vegetation structures with distinctive combinations of plants and animals, many of which depend on each other for survival. In fact, the relationship between plants and particularly insects, has been so important that many species have evolved in tandem with each other. "We decided to work with nine biomes (mainly, but not exclusively, based on Mucina and Rutherford’s The Vegetation of Southern Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland) but added other ecosystems with unique structures such as Caves, the Coastal Zone and Freshwater Habitats. And then we added the Urban Environment, since urban areas are now quite distinct from the biomes within which they are situated. Within each biome we discuss the ecological roles of the various insects based on the services they provide and their interesting life histories." It is impossible to do justice to this book in a short review. Professor Clarke Scholtz

11 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 79 (2021)