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parasitoids such as many small types of wasps and flies, herbivorous insects would run amok, wiping out their preferred host plants and destroying the ecological balance of the meadow. Without grasshoppers, flies, crickets and moths, the birds and bats would have no food. Ugly or beautiful, it is the little creatures that make the world go round. We should celebrate and appreciate them in all their wonderful diversity.

CHAPTER THREE
    Chez les Newts
    3 September 2007 . Run: 41 mins 31 secs. My legs felt heavy today, I must reduce my nightly cheese intake! People: none. Dogs: 3 . Butterfly species: 9 – a poor haul; the insect year is drawing to a close. An unseasonably late glow-worm was casting her magical green light on the patio here last night, but I can’t see her here now. It is hard to believe that these little snail-eating beetles have evolved to culture phosphorescent bacteria in their bottoms as a means to attract a mate – there must be an easier way! Great year for fruit; I snatched huge, glistening blackberries from the hedgerows as I ran – my fingers are purple from the juice – and my decrepit, lichen-encrusted peach trees in front of the house are for once laden with aromatic, golden fruit.
    Amphibians and I have something of a history. If you happen to have read A Sting in the Tale you may recall the unfortunate fate of my frostbitten Chinese painted quails, and the accidental electrocution of my tropical fish. My childhood misadventures with my menagerie of pets also resulted in the demise of various amphibians, some of which haunt me to this day. And so it is perhaps just as well (at least for the amphibians) that I chose to focus my adult career on insects.
    From a very young age I kept newts and common toads in tanks in my bedroom, and this went atypically well. The toads in particular made great pets, seemingly taking to captivity and providing great entertainment by hoovering up mealworms with their extending, sticky tongues. When I grew bored of them, or ran out of mealworms from the supply that I bred in a box under my bed, I could simply release the toads back into the garden. However, I longed to have some more exotic amphibians, and eventually I badgered my parents into buying me a pair of North American leopard frogs for Christmas: attractive, bright-green frogs with (as you might guess from the name) a profusion of black spots. I filled one of my glass fish tanks with piles of stones, peat, some plants and a small pond, to make an attractive home for them. It looked great and the frogs settled in well, but after just a few weeks their energetic hopping about caused one of the piles of stones to topple; I came home from school one day to find them both squashed.
    Undeterred, a year or so later I saved up my pocket money and bought an axolotl. It was a bizarre and wonderful creature. Axolotls are effectively giant tadpoles, reaching sexual maturity while still having the external fluffy gills and purely aquatic habit normally associated with the immature stage of newts and salamanders. They are found in the wild near Mexico City, although they are now critically endangered because of pollution and urban development. Fortunately there are plenty in captivity, particularly in labs, where they are kept to study their unusual ability to regenerate lost limbs. I had a large tank half-filled with water in which three baby red-eared terrapins lived, and I thought this would be perfect for the axolotl. It was both larger and faster than the endearing little terrapins, so it did not occur to me that they would do it any harm. I released the axolotl into the tank, watched them all swimming around for a little while – all seemed peaceable enough – and went to have my tea. I came back a while later to inspect my new pet, only to find that it had been consumed almost entirely by the terrapins, which turned out to be far more ferocious than their appearance suggested. The three of