Oh, the gopher's connected to the cricket . . .

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, relationships

I learned a couple of new words:

• Inquiline – an animal that lives in the occupied dwelling of another animal.
• Phoresy – one species of animal riding on another species.

These are just two kinds of relationships presented in Sexy Orchids Make Lousy Lovers & Other Unusual Relationships by Marty Crump. Inquilines aren't just the spiders, ants, and perhaps mice or roaches that infest our houses. The term refers also to camel crickets (and sixty other insect species) found in gopher burrows, the gobies that inhabit (and help guard) the burrows of certain shrimp, and the beetles—sometimes parasitic, sometimes commensal—that live in ant nests. And when we ride horses, it is just one sort of phoresy; the mites that flower-hop aboard the bills of hummingbirds were doing so long before people tamed horses.

And what is is about those orchids? They seem, as a class, to be bent on deceiving insects. Rather than offer bees or flies some nectar, though some kinds do, many orchids entice them with empty promises (smells or colors) only to trap them and slam pollen packets onto their backs, or they imitate sexy females and load amorous males with pollen, but leave them frustrated…and there are thousands of other modes of orchid chicanery.

These sample illustrations, from the book's dust jacket, drawn by the author's brother Alan Crump, touch on a few other relationships found in the book: A salamander using an antibiotic to keep her eggs free of fungus; a pair of penguins divorcing; a cicada-killer wasp and her prey; a monkey of one species known to use orange peel as a mosquito repellent; a crab of the sort that cleans sea lice from marine iguanas; and a cattle egret that follows the bovines to eat insects they flush up.

For simplicity's sake—you gotta organize the mess in some way!—the author, an accomplished naturalist, groups her essays into four sets:

• Relationships among members of the same animal species, from pair-bonding and grooming to cannibalism;
• Relationships between diverse species, such as cleaning, riding, and mutual defense…or mutual ingestion;
• Animals relating to plants, with gall-dwelling ant nests and the orchids that fake it;
• And the good, bad, and ugly things bacteria and fungi do for members of the animal world, from making bread dough rise to turning a beetle into a spore-dispersing corpse, to producing one of many kinds of "typhoid Mary"-type infection-spreaders.

The bottom-line message is that an ecology is defined by relationships. Think of Yellowstone (this is my example, not hers): more streamside vegetation grows there since wolves were returned to the ecosystem. Why? The partial answer is that the moose and elks are more vulnerable when eating near a stream, because there are fewer places to run. This is one of dozens of changes to the whole system that are thought to result from restoration of the natural top predator.

If there is a way two critters can interact, you can be sure that they have done so, and many of their most fascinating behaviors are found between the covers of this lovely book.