Animal Biology

Introduce listeners to the concept of food chains by examining what four animals eat. Pair this nonfiction title with its companion fiction story, Hungry Little Bear.

Discover the variety of animals that live in the rain forest, including frogs, jaguars, monkeys, parrots, and sloths. Pair this nonfiction title with its fiction companion book, Up the Tree.

Dive beneath the waves to meet the crabs, fish, turtles, whales, and seaweed that live in the ocean habitat. Pair this nonfiction title with its fiction companion book, The Fish.

Do bulls get angry when they see the color red? Do plants grow by snacking on soil? Are bats blind? At one time science supported wild notions like these! But later studies proved these ideas were nonsense. Discover science's biggest mistakes and oddest assumptions about plants and animals, and see how scientific thought changed over time.

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?

In nature, good defenses can mean the difference between surviving a predator's attack and becoming its lunch. Some animals rely on sharp teeth and claws or camouflage. But that's only the beginning. Meet creatures with some of the strangest defenses known to science.

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.