Animal Biology

A brilliantly engaging guide to the reproductive habits of creatures great and small. Narrated by the author, Dr. Carin Bondar. In The Nature of Sex, 'biologist with a twist' Carin Bondar presents the fascinating diversity of the reproductive habits of the animal kingdom and, through approachable explanations and humorous examples, succeeds in making an eternally popular subject into a book of international appeal.

What are African elephants? How different are they from Asian elephants? What do they look like, and what do they like to do? What makes male and female elephants different from each other? These and more questions will be answered with the help of this audiobook. Elephants are big and somewhat scary, especially for young kids. But with this audiobook, kids will surely have fun learning about these big animals and will be taught to appreciate them a lot more.

While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can't compare to those of other animals. For instance: the male garden spider spontaneously dies after mating with a female more than fifty times his size. Female cichlids must guard their eggs and larvae--even from the hungry appetites of their own partners. And male blanket octopuses employ a copulatory arm longer than their own bodies to mate with females that outweigh them by four orders of magnitude. Why do these gender gulfs exist?

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was never expected to be a scientist. Born in 1794 in a French village more than 100 miles from the ocean, she pursued an improbable path that brought her to the island of Sicily. There, she took up natural history and solved the two-thousand-year-old mystery of how the argonaut octopus gets its shell. In an era when most research focused on dead specimens, Jeanne was determined to experiment on living animals. And to keep sea creatures alive for her studies, she had to invent a contraption to hold them: the aquarium.