Headless Males Make Great Lovers: And Other Unusual Natural Histories

by Marty Crump

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226121992
• ISBN13: 9780226121994
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Book About the Animal Kingdom

This is a book about some of the most unusual members of the animal kingdom. The cases related here are most bizarre, yet very real. Male seahorses can get pregnant while some slugs are hermaphrodites and there really are succh things as blood sucking bats. Male deep sea anglerfish parasitically attach themselves to their females for life. Horned lizards are known to squirt blood from their eyes as a means of self-defense. Likewise, animals ranging from lizards to starfish sacrifice body parts to escape from predators and then they later regrow those same parts. Female preying mantises bite off the head of the male while the male is couplating and the headless male keeps right on with the impregnation. This book is written in the form of short essays and with a whimsical writing style to boot. This is a good book.