Creepy, Crawly Caterpillars - Hardcover

Introducing the green grappler, the hickory horned devil, the bagworm, and ten other crawlers. This splendid companion to The Big Bug Book (1994) will have budding entomologists poring over the pages. Each spread displays a greatly enlarged, dramatically colored caterpillar; along the bottom of the illustration runs a line of smaller drawings of the stages of growth--egg, caterpillar, pupa, adult moth--often hard to come by in much more difficult books. The accompanying text is precise, informative, but above all, exciting. In a description of anatomy, the author notes that caterpillars can ``twist and turn better than any human acrobat because they have four thousand muscles. Humans have only 670 skeletal muscles.'' Individual descriptions include the details children relish: Tent caterpillar moths have no mouth parts; there are over 800 kinds of bagworms, each building its own style of bag with silk and twigs; and the lily-leaf caterpillar makes a waterproof sleeping bag of a folded leaf. Exemplary. (Picture book/nonfiction. 3+) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Grade 2-5?This book will be greeted with cries of delight by those seeking new, attractive, and informative materials for a "butterfly" project or science unit on metamorphosis. After an introduction to basic caterpillar anatomy and behavior, Facklam presents a baker's dozen of common and decidedly uncommon species ranging from the familiar migratory Monarchs and hibernating woolly bears to the distinctly unusual carnivorous green grappler (caterpillar stage of the Hawaiian Eupithecia moth). The clear, readable text is confined to most of one side of a double-page spread; the rest is taken up by an arresting, full-color, much magnified illustration of the caterpillar in question and a colorful base border depicting the four stages to flight?egg, caterpillar, chrysalis/cocoon, butterfly/moth. A glossary completes this dramatically illustrated, competently written package.?Patricia Manning, Eastchester Public Library, NY
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.