An easy to use guide book for beginner naturalists and nature educators that introduces us to the commonly spotted insects and spiders of Bengaluru City. The book takes a peek into their fascinating characteristics and behaviours, and the spaces these six and eight-legged animals inhabit.
Explore the hidden world of insects and spiders in Bengaluru with this specially curated guide for the beginner and curious naturalist. Featuring engaging visuals and scientific jargon-free descriptions, this book introduces us to some of the commonly spotted insects and spiders that use and share our urban spaces.
Discover the Biodiversity of Bengaluru: From community parks and forests, lakes, vibrant gardens and human built up spaces, Bengaluru is home to a remarkable diversity of insects and spiders using these spaces and habitats. This easy to carry around guide book invites you to pause, observe, and marvel at the remarkable invertebrate biodiversity thriving around us even in our cities.
A Companion for Nature Lovers: This book is an ideal resource not just for a beginner naturalist, but for any nature enthusiast – from students to seasoned experts. Nature educators can also use it as a free and open-source education and outreach tool. In fact, we have printed copies available for educators and naturalists to use in their outreach efforts—request your copy through the link below.
Additionally, we’ve uploaded a high-resolution web version of the entire book, which is available for free download and use by anyone. So go ahead and get your copy right away!
** This project was previously titled ‘Flashcards on common spiders and Insects’, since the project was originally conceived as a set of 50 Flash Cards featuring common insects and spiders found in Bengaluru city. As we began work on it, we realised that compiling the species and information in 50 cards would not do any justice to the diversity of life forms that we had been spotting, documenting and wanted to showcase. Once we had compiled the content, with inputs from fellow naturalists and educators we decided to change the format from flash cards to a pocket-sized easy to use book.
The Project Team
Collaborating Organisations: Nature Conservation Foundation, EcoEdu, Bengaluru Sustainability Forum.
This work is licensed to Vena Kapoor, Priya Venkatesh, Vaidya R., and Bengaluru Sustainability Forum 2024 under a CC-BY-SA 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
This book is open-source and free to use, download and reproduce as an educational and not-for-profit resource, but please remember to acknowledge and mention the authors and BSF. Photographs were donated by various photographers who kindly gave us permission to use their images for this book since this is a free educational tool.
Project Start Date: May 2020
Contact:
- Vena Kapoor: vena.kapoor@gmail.com
- Priya Venkatesh: priya@naturalist.school
- Vaidya R: vaidyanathan.r@gmail.com
In the News:
- Citizen Matters, February 17, 2025
- Bangalore Mirror, January 20, 2025
- Radio Mirchi
- The Hindu, January 08, 2025
Status Report & Updates:
This project was originally conceived as a set of 50 Flash Cards featuring common insects and spiders found in Bengaluru city. As we began work on it, we realised that compiling the species and information in 50 cards would not do any justice to the diversity of life forms that we had been spotting, documenting and wanted to showcase. Once we had compiled the content, with inputs from fellow naturalists and educators we decided to change the format from flash cards to a pocket-sized easy to use book.
The final version of the book was completed in December 2024. We hope that the book will fill a gap in the space of easy to use identification guides for beginner naturalists and nature educators in Bengaluru. This open-source book introduces the user to 22 groups of commonly spotted insects and spiders of Bengaluru City and takes a peek into their fascinating characteristics and behaviours. We reached out to various photographers who generously donated their images of species that we wanted to include and feature in the book. We intentionally chose images that show the group and species in their natural habitats and in their typical postures and avoided very macro shots that looked stunning but would not have served the purpose of easy identification. We wanted people to be introduced to the amazing natural history traits of these ubiquitous animals that are often ignored and misunderstood.
Bengaluru city is fortunate to have a diversity of habitat types like community parks, forests, lakes, vibrant gardens and human built up spaces and is therefore home to a remarkable diversity of insects and spiders using these spaces. We designed the guide book to be small enough to carry around easily with the hope that more people in their walks and in their day to day activities pause, observe, and marvel at the remarkable invertebrate biodiversity that are around us.
The book is currently getting translated to Kannada and we will use the rest of the budget to print limited copies of the Kannada translated book and additional copies of the English version.
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