"Her precise but jolly prose treats hummingbird nostril mites, blood-sharing vampire bats and bubble-hunting whales with such enthusiasm that it is like meeting long-lost friends. . . . Vastly enjoyable."

Adrian Barnett | New Scientist

"Another successful blend of charm and nature. . . . As pleasant a sojourn into so many different worlds as any reader could want."

Booklist

"Charmingly written—and charmingly illustrated by the author’s brother Alan—the book is a believe-it-or-not treasury of glue-spitting soldier ants, divorced birds, monkeys that dose themselves with herbal cures, and underwater day spas where big fish suspend their practice of eating little fish in exchange for getting their scales groomed and their teeth cleaned. Less easily anthropomorphized species, fungi and bacteria, come in for their own share of behavioral observation. Crump’s entertaining anecdotes build to a heartfelt moral: The world is a wondrous place, and it is our obligation to keep it that way."

Amanda Heller | Boston Globe

"In this jaunty, jovial, somewhat anthropomorphizing romp, behavioral ecologist Marty Crump catalogs a range of interdependent species behaviors—from the semi-social to the purely ecological—that make up life on earth. Some of the relationships she details—like the pseudoscorpion that mates on the back of a South American giant harlequin beetle—may seem odd, but then again, she infers, it’s efficient to get all that loving done in transit. . . . Crump’s zoology contains housecleaners, groomers, and even marital squabbles. If all this domesticates the natural world, it also makes the human one seem more contiguous with it. Crump leaves us feeling, in our human-yet-animal skin, just a tad stranger."

Tess Taylor | Audubon Magazine

"I am grateful to Crump for having brought so many amazing facts to my attention and I am impressed by the industry shown by her and her colleagues. One group whose work she alludes to has been studying a colony of yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado since 1962. Forty-seven years spent watching a whistling rodent – that’s what I call dedication."

Tom Fort | The Daily Telegraph

"Need some quirky icebreakers to make it through a holiday season’s worth of awkward party conversations? Look no further than behavior ecologist Marty Crump’s new collection of weird animal behaviors, a follow-up to 2005’s Headless Males Make Great Lovers. Her new book focuses on unusual relationships in nature between animals and plants. The title essay describes how, "from an orchid’s perspective, all is fair in love and cross-pollination." One-third of orchid species offer their pollinators no nectar. But by swaying seductively in the breeze or mimicking the smell of female insects, the orchids trick horny male insects into pollinating them. Elsewhere in the book, Crump even explains why dogs roll in stinky spots, a behavior that has perplexed many a pet owner: Turns out Fluffy is masking her own scent, enabling her to sneak up on prey undetected or, some experts think, helping her attract more attention from other dogs."

Rachel Saslow | Washington Post

“This work offers a delicious smorgasbord of fascinating species interactions. Readers are treated to descriptions of and explanations for a variety of exotic behaviors and remarkable relationships between organisms. . . . It should inspire everyone to become a naturalist.”

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