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Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals Paperback – January 1, 2013

by Becky Crew (Author)

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The peacock mantis shrimp has the most powerful punch on Earth; vampire spiders are attracted to smelly socks; and the lesser water boatman is the loudest animal in the world—its instrument is its own penis. From the mother-eating black-lace weaver spiders to the Texas horned lizards that shoot jets of poisonous blood from their eyes, this fascinating book introduces a menagerie of the world’s weirdest, and most fascinating, animals.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of New South Wales Press
Publication date

January 1, 2013
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

174223321X
ISBN-13

978-1742233215
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"This quirky little blog serves up science with a healthy dose of snark." —Jennifer Ouellette, science writer, Washington Post, Nature, and New Scientist, on Running Ponies

About the Author

Becky Crew is online editor of the Australian magazine COSMOS, the cofounder of the Running Ponies blog, and the recipient of the Australian Science Blogger of the Year Award.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of New South Wales Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 174223321X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1742233215
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,580,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,588 in Zoology (Books)

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Judy Jones

Amazing how brilliant mother nature is, not to mention those who research this stuff.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 26, 2013

Verified Purchase

Unable to put this book down. Very interesting content and easy to read.
Not sure about the weird conversations the writer generated in between chapters.
All up, a great read for anyone interested in learning something different about life.

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Troy

Good collection of stories

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

I liked the stories about all the animals. The story that runs throughout is a little odd and seems out of place though.

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edward brine

Curious? Yes. Weird? No

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 18, 2013

Because every animal developed it's own survival mechanism what seems to be weird for us is pretty normal for them.
Who are we to apply our own human filters on the outcome of billion years of evolution?

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Mathew J Wedel

An odyssey through the lives of weird animals (but not for kids)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 27, 2013

Full disclosure: the author is a friend and colleague of mine, and kindly sent me an advance review copy when I asked for one.

The book lives up to its title. There is a lot of weird stuff in here--I mean _really_ weird. Most of the entries practically beg to be read aloud to an astounded audience. I kept pestering my wife with snippets from the book until she said, with a look of profound disgust, "I no longer approve of evolution. Animals are just too gross." Some of it, like mind-controlling flukes and 42-cm duck penises, will be familiar to many web-savvy folks interested in animals. But most of it was new to me, and will probably be new to you as well. Five of the fifty essays in the book are recycled from blog posts, but the other 90% is new material.

Each essay is three to five pages long and centers around one animal and its weirdness (or, very occasionally, two animals who share some related weirdness). Some of the weirdness is anatomical, some of it is behavioral, some of it is so weird it defies easy categorization. Helpfully, below the title of each essay is a subtitle that gives both the popular and scientific names of the subject critters (except a handful of weirdoes, either extinct or newly discovered, that have no popular names). About a fourth of the entries have an illustration of the featured critter.

Now, the book is not just a freak show of "hey, look, monkeys pee on themselves to get dates, isn't that weird?" In every case, Becky explains why the animals do these weird things, according to our best current understanding. So the weirdness of each animal becomes a window into some other realm of science, whether it's the physiology of neurotoxins, the ecology of estuaries, the antimicrobial properties of bat saliva, or how the geomorphology of the Guiana Highlands has influenced the escape behavior of frogs.

In these explanations, Becky cites relevant peer-reviewed research, much of it recent but some of it old, for historical background. She quotes from a 1922 paper on anglerfish, and two of the chapters are devoted to marine worms that were only discovered in 2006 and 2009. I count 114 books and papers and 27 websites in the bibliography, which is helpfully broken down by section and has the publications and websites segregated within each section.

There's a lot of meat on these bones: in addition to literature citations, almost every essay includes direct quotes from the scientists involved in the studies. I don't know how many of the quotes came from press-releases-certainly not all, since the former outnumber the latter by a wide margin-and how many come from Becky getting in touch with the scientists directly. Based on both the informality of the quotes and Becky's extensive chops as a science journalist, I suspect most of the quotes are the results of her own hard work of finding these people and getting them to talk.

Okay, so who's in the book? Here's my very approximate, non-phylogenetic breakdown. The total adds up to 50, because some of the pieces feature more than one critter. I think the coverage is pretty even for a popular zoology book-there's certainly no hint that Becky skewed toward charismatic megafauna.

EXTANT
Insects: 7
Spiders: 5
Other invertebrates: 8
Fish (i.e., non-tetrapod vertebrates): 6
Herps (amphibians and reptiles): 6
Birds: 4
Mammals: 9

EXTINCT
Non-avian dinos: 5
Paleomammals: 2

Now, it's not science all the time. As you might expect from the title, one of the hallmarks of Becky's writing has always been her irreverent approach to her subjects. Like a sort of Miss Manners meets Dr. Ruth, Becky is prone to imagining the social lives of her animals--by which I mean, job interviews, failed dates, and awkward family get-togethers--and to giving them advice. In what I'm calling the `informal segments', the colossal squid is a peeping tom, Microraptor is a stripper, the naked mole rat is a Bond villain, and the male deep-sea anglerfish is a troubled teenager trying to find the whereabouts of his father. Becky's animals text each other, suffer hangovers, blow off their friends to watch Downton Abbey, and complain about Selena Gomez. Some of the pop culture references may not age well, but I reckon by the time they're out of date, Becky will have written another book.

The informal segments vary in length, with some critters just getting a couple of lines and others getting a page or two. They're always clearly set off from the rest of the essay, so if they do nothing for you, they're easy enough to skip over. Me, I think they're hilarious, and I laughed a lot while reading the book. After digesting something technical on, say, neuroanatomy, it's nice to laugh at the gulf pipefish getting hit on by losers at the bar.

Other strong points:

- Becky is always alert to the uncertainty inherent in science, the potential for disagreements and for our current understanding to be revised in the light of new data. Reading the book, you definitely get the impression that zoology is a human enterprise, that "current knowledge" is the membrane of a human-generated bubble of understanding in an ocean of Unknown Weird.

- Becky is equally alert to the possibility inherent in science, that there are always more surprises waiting for us out there, more facts to discover and more explanations to figure out. The overall tone of the book is happy and optimistic. It's clear that Becky loves learning about weird animals and loves telling others about them almost as much.

Any cons? A few, none major. I caught a couple of typos, but only a couple, which IME is about par for a book of this length (260 pp). There were one or two bits of what I assume is Australian slang in the informal segments, but I figured them out from context and they didn't interfere with my enjoyment at all. There are one or two points where phylogenetic terms are either misunderstood or at least oddly applied--for example, Ruminantia is not "an ancient family of ruminants", but a huge clade encompassing many `families' of extant ruminants (cattle, sheep, deer, antelope, camels, etc.) and their fossil relatives. But again, there were only a couple such instances and neither counts for much.

There is some profanity in the book. I counted about half a dozen f-bombs, and a few other cuss words. At first I thought that was a poor decision, because it would keep me from recommending the book to, say, a precocious 12-year-old. But that's because I was still in the first section, on predators. Once I got to the section on mating habits, I realized that I wouldn't be recommending this book to kids anyway, what with all the forcible intercourse, extra-species sex, penis-drumming, and animals living in other animals' rear ends. It's all real stuff, and it's all really interesting, and I don't believe that this sort of material should be off-limits forever. But I also don't think that preteens have any pressing need to learn about enthusiastic oral sex among bats. Your parental control mileage may vary.

If you're not sure if the book is for you, or you'd like a test drive, you can head over to Becky's blog, 'Running Ponies' (on the Scientific American blog network) and check out her writing for free. It will give a pretty good sense of what you're in for, although I got the impression that Becky was really swinging for the fences in the book--the writing's a little tighter and the whole thing is just a bit more polished than her average blog entry.

Verdict: I loved it. Go get a copy for yourself or the (grown-up) animal lover in your life.

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Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals Paperback – January 1, 2013

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