Steven examines the relationships between people and often creepy arthropod bugs (insects, spiders and scorpions...), more primitive then vertebrates but some 80% of animal wildlife, usually just seen as creepy. Many are problematic, verminous or voracious like locusts, whose swarms can devastate whole regions, but often kept under control best by others, like spiders or Kenyan ants. Some spread diseases, like malaria mosquitoes. Many are edible, even insects, sometimes crucial for poor people, some even culinary delicatessen like various crustaceans. Bees and butterflies are indispensable pollinators. In China the silk worm and its produce became the key commodity for commercial development and cultural cross-fertilization along the Silk Road to India, Turkestans, Persia, Arabia and Europe. Furthermore, some of their efficient anatomy and constructions, like spider webs, keep inspiring designers and engineers, colony species' semi-chaotic social structure like ant hills and bee hives inspire human organizations.

Arthropods aren't just the most numerous animals and omnipresent, they are also vital parts of most biotopes. Many are at the basis of food chains like tiny krill, which eats phytoplankton and is eaten by fish and whales. Many are specialized in recycling, like dun beetles and various scavengers. Some transform their environments even at landscape level, link ant and termite colonies. Other regulate bug populations, like spiders. Most important for plant life are pollinators, like bees and butterflies.

Insects owe their massive numbers and general, long-term success to combined factors. Extreme fertility, fast reproduction, hence short cycle make adapting fast and flooding any niche possible. They evolved and still increase enormous diversity, fitted to all kinds of environments and minute changes, in an 'arms race' of co-evolution, which stimulates diversity further.