This book is dedicated to my Ph.D. advisor, Neil Croll (1941–1981), whose seminal text “The Behaviour of Nematodes” launched the field in 1970. The current effort is a thick, heavy tome when compared to Croll's slim and elegant little book, directly reflecting the explosion of interest in the topic, due in no small part to a single nematode Caenorhabiditis elegans. However, C. elegans is not the star of this book. The present effort is meant to be broad in its taxonomic scope, attempting to consolidate disparate nematode behaviours into a comprehensive up-to-date volume. Indeed, this is a formidable task in a world in which 4 out of every 5 metazoans is a nematode, and the end result is a bit uneven. To cover the taxonomic breadth, several chapters focused on simply describing proximate behaviours. Thus, Chapter 1 – Ecological and behavioural adaptations; Chapter 3 – Orientation; Chapter 4 – Feeding; Chapter 7 – Osmoregulation; and Chapter 8 – Physiological and biochemical basis of behaviour, were generally not synthetic, and read like catalogues of behaviour descriptors, often with little context on the natural history or biology of the responses. These chapters are not accessible to the non-specialist student, and their value lies primarily in their extensive literature searches. On the other hand, there are several wonderful pieces, including Chapter 5 – Reproductive behaviour and Chapter 6 – Ageing and development, whose compelling and clearly written stories cut across the artificial lines of plant, insect, animal, and parasite designations, to address the essence of our understanding of nematode behaviour. In this group, I particularly liked Chapter 2 – Locomotion, for the succinct incorporation of historical ideas into the growth of current thinking in this area. Chapter 9 – Molecular basis of behaviour, was an excellent presentation of behaviour in the C. elegans model system, and the authors did an outstanding job making the concepts and techniques in this high-tech area accessible to students of general biology. The remaining 4 chapters fell somewhere in the middle of the continuum. Overall, I think this a good effort, and I recommend this book for the shelves of every nematode biologist. It is valuable because of the sheer amount of information on nematode behaviour that it contains, and especially for the reference lists. For the 4 or 5 well-written chapters, this book is priceless!