How to Know the Aquatic Insects

Rating:
Summary: Aquatic insects and biological monitoring
Review: Lehmkuhl does an excellent job with discription of life cycles, morphology, and how insects are used in biological monitoring. The bibliography is extensive and organized by major family and order. This is a good text for beginning aquatic biologists and teachers that want to start pollution monitoring of streams and rivers, however I would have liked to have seen more detail on collection methods, specifically kick net methods. Kick nets are build specifically for this method of collection and provide a better means than the "window screen" method described. It would have also been nice to go into the methodology of where and how to perform sampling. The only other improvement I would make would to have included more drawings of entire insects(ie. various genera and species of Plecoptera) and some photographs would have been a nice supplement as well. Otherwise a very well done and helpful text.

Thomas Smith Environmental Technology Instructor River Bend Career and Tech. Center

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for benthic macroinvertebrate monitoring
Review: This excellent little wire-bound book is particularly easy to use in the field--and it lies flat on a lab bench. The book provides brief sections on introduction to aquatic insects, marine insects, frequently encountered non-insects, insect morphology, collecting and preserving, use of aquatic insects in water quality work, a section on how to use the book, and references. The bulk of the book consists of a key to orders followed by a series of keys to families or, in some cases, subfamilies. For the benefit of amateurs like myself, drawings are numerous and clear and a good deal of information about distribution, ecology, and appearance is provided in the keys. If one is getting started in benthic macroinvertebrate surveys or has students doing high school science projects on aquatic insects, this little book provides a lot of bang for the buck.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for benthic macroinvertebrate monitoring
Review: This excellent little wire-bound book is particularly easy to use in the field--and it lies flat on a lab bench. The book provides brief sections on introduction to aquatic insects, marine insects, frequently encountered non-insects, insect morphology, collecting and preserving, use of aquatic insects in water quality work, a section on how to use the book, and references. The bulk of the book consists of a key to orders followed by a series of keys to families or, in some cases, subfamilies. For the benefit of amateurs like myself, drawings are numerous and clear and a good deal of information about distribution, ecology, and appearance is provided in the keys. If one is getting started in benthic macroinvertebrate surveys or has students doing high school science projects on aquatic insects, this little book provides a lot of bang for the buck.