A wilder look at wildlife

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals

The book title is The Truth About Animals: Stones Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife. It is by Lucy Cooke, who does know a thing or two about animals. But if the title were anything close to accurate, the book would amount to millions of pages. Nonetheless, it is a fun romp.

The thirteen chapters spin out stories of thirteen animals, misconceptions about them—and how those were debunked—, and a strong dollop of "down and dirty", usually about their sex lives. For example, sex seems to be the only thing a sloth does quickly...over and over again (The author, a real sloth fanatic, is the first person to film sloth sex). Even their bathroom habits are quite a bit slower than a snail's pace: roughly one defecation weekly, for which the poor beast must make its way down the tree to drop the evidence of its existence on the ground and cover it with detritus.

The "lovelorn hippos" of the title refer to male hippos in Colombia, offspring of a small pack of them imported by Pablo Escobar in his heyday. Since the patriarch drives out all his sons once they reach puberty, they disperse around the countryside, looking in vain for mates among other packs of hippos.

The chapter on frogs dwells quite a bit on Xenopus, the African Clawed Frog, which used to be used for pregnancy testing. Only many years after the method was developed, and after it had become obsolete (replaced by the blue strip of monoclonal antibodies now in use), did it become clear that the frogs, millions of them, had brought with them "chytrid", a fungus parasite that is gradually destroying most other frog and toad species around the world. Xenopus is immune to chytrid; not so for most other amphibian species.

Oh, by the way, should you ever get close enough to a vulture to try to catch it, you ought to know that they keep cool on hot days by defecating on their legs and feet. Who knows, maybe the smell of fresh poop is also a real turn-on to the opposite sex! (Hmm, is this in any way related to a phrase from a love letter from Napoleon to Josephine, when he planned to return early from a battle, "I'll be home tomorrow – don't bathe!")

I really can't think of how to describe more without giving too much away. All the animals in the book, a fish, 8 mammals, 3 birds, and an amphibian, are vertebrates. There are 40,000 species of them in thousands of categories, so there's lots of room for sequels if the author is so inclined. And then, should she decide to tell us about some invertebrates, there are, so far, at least a couple of million species, though most are insects. But, hey, some are "bigger than a bedbug", such as squids, giant African tree snails, and six-foot Australian earthworms. A fun book.