Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories - Softcover

Crump, Marty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226122026 ISBN 13: 9780226122021

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

The natural world is filled with diverse—not to mention quirky and odd—animal behaviors. Consider the male praying mantis that continues to mate after being beheaded; the spiders, insects, and birds that offer gifts of food in return for sex; the male hip-pocket frog that carries his own tadpoles; the baby spiders that dine on their mother; the beetle that craves excrement; or the starfish that sheds an arm or two to escape a predator's grasp.

Headless Males Make Great Lovers and Other Unusual Natural Histories celebrates the extraordinary world of animals with essays on curious creatures and their amazing behaviors. In five thematic chapters, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. Crump's enthusiasm for the unusual behaviors she describes-from sex change and free love in sponges to aphrodisiac concoctions in bats-is visible on every page, thanks to her skilled storytelling, which makes even sea slugs, dung beetles, ticks, and tapeworms fascinating and appealing. Steeped in biology, Headless Males Make Great Lovers points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly bizarre behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are successful ways of living.

Illustrated throughout, and filled with vignettes of personal and scientific interest, Headless Males Make Great Lovers will enchant the general reader with its tales of blood-squirting horned lizards and intestine-ejecting sea cucumbers—all in the service of a greater appreciation of the diversity of the natural histories of animals.

About this title

About the Author

Marty Crump is Adjunct Professor of Biology at Northern Arizona University and a Conservation Fellow of the Wildlife Conservation Society. A recipient of the Distinguished Herpetologist Award, she is coauthor of In Search of the Golden Frog, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

From Booklist

The natural world is full of interesting, diverse, and sometimes bizarre methods that the world's species use for dealing with life. Marty Crump, author of In Search of the Golden Frog (2000) and a field biologist who works with amphibians, has brought together what she calls "gee whiz" stories for a general audience. The reader learns of red kangaroos, the females of which are often simultaneously pregnant, nursing a young joey in the pouch, and also nursing a large joey from a different nipple (with different milk). Egyptian vultures break into ostrich eggs by throwing stones at them, a behavior that is taught, not instinctive. And, in the titular story, the author explains why female praying mantises bite the heads off their mates (and what canny males do to avoid decapitation). Illustrated throughout with line drawings, and bolstered with a chapter-by-chapter list of references, this marvelous introduction to the whys and wherefores of animal behavior will find an audience in all libraries. Nancy Bent
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0226122026
• ISBN 13: 9780226122021
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 211
• Illustrator: Crump Alan