“A marvelous introduction to the whys and wherefores of animal behavior...”

Booklist

“It’s not just about insect sex—though there is a lot of it here. Marty Crump’s book is a trawl through the whole gamut of weird animal behaviours. Watch out for spine-anointing, toad-chewing hedgehogs; tortoises that stomp the ground to draw up worms; and the mantids of the title that mate more effectively once the female has bitten off their heads. With Crump’s 30-plus years of experience in the field, this beautifully written and charmingly illustrated book combines acute observation with helpful explanation. Nature has never seemed so bizarre and splendid.”

Adrian Barnett | New Scientist

“Weird words have their fans; and so do weird moments in natural history. In this book, biologist Marty Crump celebrates animal diversity, with the emphasis on the bizarre. Her aim is to bring the stuff of scientific papers to the general public. She ranges widely, from elephant seals to bowerbirds. The headings include sex, of course, as well as eating, young-rearing and defensive behaviour. Who would believe that hedgehogs anoint themselves with toad venom as a defence? That rabbits eat their own dung? Or that sea slugs like group sex? The book grosses out, but also educates. Not for intelligent design proponents.”

LUCY SUSSEX | The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

“This unnatural history of the diverse social and sexual practices of insects and animals makes you glad that you are not a slipper limpet, even though it spends most of its life engaged in group sex and changes sex regularly. Nobody has a worse life than emperor penguins which breed in temperatures as low as minus 95F (-70C) and in wind speeds that reach 120mph. Female spiders chew the heads off their mates during sex—but they’re game guys so they find another mate which eats what’s left of them. Do they care? They’re just doing what a guy’s gotta do.”

Iain Finlayson | Times UK

“Crump starts with sex but then explores other natural phenomena with an engaging down-to-earth approach that will keep you turning the pages from blood meals to legs modified into fangs to pheronomes as alarm signals. It’s a great read.”

Sharon Wooten | The Olympian

“The combination of bizarre facts and rational, evolution-based explanations will make this an ideal book for an intelligent, nature-obsessed teenager (or, indeed, any-ager). I wish I could have read it 50 years ago. . . . We are living at a time of exponential growth in zoological knowledge, and inspired popularizers like Marty Crump . . . are needed to interpret the new findings for the rest of us.”

Nicholas Gould | International Zoo News