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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.