Nasty, Brutish, and Short: The Quirks and Quarks Guide to Animal Sex and Other Weird Behaviour

by Pat Senson

Birds do it, and bees do it, so do all animals, some of them in weird and wonderful ways. Quirks & Quarks' latest book explores the more bizarre behaviours of more than 100 creatures, from barnacles to Panda bears.

The tiny spider that has to tear off one of its two huge sex organs just to be able to get around; the sea slug that produces a powerful love drug and mates with both males and females; the bedbug that stabs its penis into the female's abdomen — the range of animal sexual practices is mind-boggling. And it's not only reproduction that has them doing very strange things. There's a beetle that shoots a stream of boiling hot, toxic liquid when it's threatened; a lizard that can run on water; a shrimp that explodes its prey.

Quirks & Quarks' latest guide is much more than a catalogue of peculiar practices, it's an engrossing look at the astonishing behaviours different animals have evolved in order to survive and reproduce.

With an introduction by Bob McDonald, host of Quirks & Quarks.

Genres: Science, Animals, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Carin]

As you can probably tell by the spelling in the title, this book isn't American. It's Canadian, which also explains the "Quirks and Quarks" which is a Canadian radio show. This book is a collection of short essays based on radio bits about science, particularly zoology. Mostly it's about insects, with bird and fish following, and eventually a few mammals. The book started off with a bang, with the initial chapter "The Battle of the Sexes," all about sex. But the book is mostly focused on not just the weird things different creatures do, but why. Why certain animals would have evolved such unusual behaviors/physical characteristics, and what advantages those evolutions would have given them, is the goal of this book.

For instance, the Argentine lake duck has not only the longest penis (proportionally) of any vertebrate but it's also shaped like a corkscrew. The female duck's lady parts are also shaped like a corkscrew, but in the wrong direction. Why on earth would the ducks have evolved this way? Clownfish (you know, like Nemo), when they are born are neither male or female. In fact, in each anemone colony, there are only 2 fish that have a gender. The largest fish is a female, the next largest is a male. When the female dies, the male then turns into a female, and the 3rd largest fish turns into the male.

Not all of the odd facts are quite as bizarre as these, and many of them make sense pretty quickly. But it is filled with really weird and unusual science. The sections are super-short (1-3 pages) so that helps the book zip by quickly. It is a bit punny for my taste, but I was able to overlook that. Was the book as good as the best science book I've ever read, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson? No. But that was a very high bar. This book was still fun and informative.

[Jordan Venn]

Good book. Interesting content. Had some annoying qualities though like always converting to imperial. Who cares about imperial?

[Richard Archambault]

I actually didn't finish it. The constant puns got annoying enough that I decided to stop reading it. Interesting subject matter, though.