Get the Scoop on Animal Snot, Spit & Slime!: From Snake Venom to Fish Slime, 251 Cool Facts About Mucus, Saliva & More!

by Dawn Cusick

Learn amazingly icky facts, see the yucky photos, and gross out everyone you can! Welcome to a world filled with snot otters, puss caterpillars, spitting spiders, slime stars, snotties, and more! In Get the Scoop, you'll learn that snot, spit, and slime may seem gross, but there's a lot of amazing science in these icky fluids. Animals use them for communication, defense, to find food, to travel fast, and more. Jellyfish and corals produce "mucus nets" to capture prey. Parrotfish burp out a mucus blanket to sleep under every night, while sea stars and sponges release volumes of mucus to distract and discourage predators. Barracudas use mucus in their scales to increase their swimming speeds and protect them from parasites. Poison dart frogs release toxins with mucus. Hagfish secrete slime if another animal tries to eat them. Clams and mussels make "mucus strings" to bring food to their mouths. Hippopotamuses release "blood slime" that works as sunscreen and an antibiotic. Saliva helps animals in hundreds of ways, too. Anteaters and giraffes use sticky saliva to help them eat, while leeches, vampire bats, and ticks use chemicals in their saliva to help them feed on blood. Many mammals use saliva to help them recognize offspring and others spit saliva at predators and prey. The venom in shrews, snakes, and other reptiles comes from adapted salivary glands. Some animal saliva works like glue, helping swifts, termites, and wasps build nests.

Genres: Animals, Science

80 pages, Hardcover

Published September 15, 2016

About the author

Dawn Cusick is blessed with many talents. She combined her writing and artistic skills and spent nearly twenty years working an in-house author and editor for a craft book publisher, producing titles such as Tabletop Fountains, The Michaels' Book of Arts and Crafts, and multiple editions of Quilt National. Her fascination with science and nature has now led her to create children's science books.

In between books, Dawn teaches biology at a community college in western North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, two sons, and not nearly enough cats.

Reviews

[Sarah Easton Miller]

I read this book (just a few of the best and grossest pages!) on an outreach to 3rd and 4th graders recently. They loved the slime, and snot presented this non-fiction book! It was a perfect read for their age and interest.

[Heydi Smith]

I want to put a display together of all these books about snot and poop and other liquified that come out of animals. Wouldn't that be a riot? I hope it becomes a reality one day. This will definitely be in the display!

[Elizabeth]

Read to see if this would work as a give away for middle schoolers.

Eh. The information in this book is very interesting, but the lay out could easily be overwhelming, especially for reluctant readers who would see all the text and say "no" right away. I feel like a format closer to the "Weird but true" book series would have lent itself to this title better. It would have been more visually appealing and more likely to grab a child or teen's attention.

While it is a book that I could recommend to kids who like "gross" stuff- it is not one that I will be trying to purchase to give to teens.

[Lizzie]

Did you know that kittens always nurse from the same teat??? Most of the book is about sea creatures, but I still enjoyed. Was expecting a little more mammalian action