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    Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories
    Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories
    Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories
    Ebook201 pages4 hours

    Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories

    By Marty Crump and Alan Crump

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateNov 15, 2008
    ISBN9780226122083
    Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories

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    Reviews for Headless Males Make Great Lovers

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    • 3/5
      Fun, accessible recounting of dozens of fascinating facts about animals. Covers some of the behaviours we think odd or creepy, and some that are more traditionally fascinating. Veers into cuteness, but only rarely. Though it's not deep, it's very wide, and full of lots of interesting anecdotes.
    • 4/5
      Summary: In Headless Males Make Great Lovers, Marty Crump sets out to give her readers a peek into the crazy world of natural history - that is, the study of how animals live their lives. She breaks it down into five broad categories: mating behavior, parental behavior, predation, protection, and communication, and covers such examples as male salamanders using fang-like protrusions on their jaw to directly inject pheromones into the female to make her receptive to mating; frogs that store their eggs in their vocal sacs and then belch up their tadpoles once they've hatched; and deep-sea anglerfish where a male will bite on to a much larger female, and hang on until she's ready to lay her eggs... which may take months.Review: I've been a sucker for natural history factoids ever since my parents first got me my first subscription to Zoobooks; the stuff that some animal species do in the daily course of living is so crazy, so bizzare, and so completely foreign to our own experience that it tops the strangest things a sci-fi novelist could hope to dream up. So, despite the fact that I already knew about a lot of what Crump was writing about (and in fact was spotting places where I thought she missed an opportunity to introduce some neat relevant trivia tidbits), this book was still like candy to me. And personally, one of the best parts was that Crump actually presented some examples that I hadn't heard of, and I learned some things I didn't know before - like the fact that baby kangaroos spend their first four months continuously attached to a nipple in their mom's pouch, or that rattlesnakes can shed and re-grow their fangs, or that dung beetles in India bury 50,000 tons of human waste per day! So cool!While this book is definitely aimed at people who agree with me that that sort of thing is cool, not gross (well, okay, kind of gross), it's not geared exclusively towards scientists. Crump is very good at keeping her science accessible to the layperson without talking down to her readers or sacrificing accuracy, and the prose is bright and clean and easy to read. I realize it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I think the fact that I had a fun time reading it, even when I already knew about the salamanders or the fish or whatever, speaks pretty highly in its favor. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Not exclusive to scientists, I think this would be fun for anyone with more than a passing interest in natural history: zoo- and museum-goers, Discovery Channel watchers, National Geographic subscribers, etc.
    • 5/5
      Reality is strange. Reality is, in fact, often stranger than anything humans can come up with in fiction. In Headless Males Make Great Lovers & Other Unusual Natural Histories Marty Crump places this truth front and center, and gives an accounting of a wide array of bizarre ways that animals breed, care for their young, find food, defend themselves from predators, and communicate. Using nontechnical language Crump effortlessly moves from animal to animal, describing their strange behaviour patterns, explaining the rigors of the lives this sort of activity requires from the creatures, and explains the survival value that some of the odder animal adaptations bring to the animals.The book is divided up into five sections, each one covering a broad aspect of animal physiology and behaviour. Within each of these broadly defined sections are chapters that group the various animal behaviours into related categories. So, for example, under the section title "Ain't Love Grand" (which covers breeding strategies), there are chapters titled "Sneakers and Deceivers" (covering animals that try to sneak their way into the breeding market), "Trading Food for Sex" (about animals that use food to entire or even ensnare their mates), and of course "Headless Males Make Great Lovers" (about animals, including the praying mantis, where the male has to be careful to avoid being eaten by his partner). As one can tell from the chapter titles, Crump approaches each topic with a mixture of humor combined with the eye of a serious scientist resulting in a book that is both enjoyable to read, and packed with information.[More forthcoming]

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    Headless Males Make Great Lovers - Marty Crump

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