The first comprehensive guide facilitating the identification of Australian water bugs. It provides an overview on all 15 families, 17 subfamilies and 55 genera known to occur on mainland Australia, Tasmania and nearby islands. For each genus, the handbook includes a description of the characters used to identify the genus and to separate the genus from similar genera, an illustration to show overall appearance (habitus) of a representative species, an illustrated key to species recorded from Australia, overview of the biology of the genus and a map showing the locations where the genus has been found in Australia.