What We Can Learn from Animal Friendships
Animal BFFs is a fun illustrated book, teaching young readers who creatures in the wild kingdom also have best friends, often to help each other out. Someone who’s always there for them through thick and thin, to help them out with all the usual things that friends do.
You know like – picking ticks off your back, or letting you know when a lion is about to make you its dinner, or helping you to hunt down some tasty prey.
The animal kingdom is full of odd couples, that prove that sometimes it’s better to be together:
- Ostriches and zebras
- Grey wolves and striped hyenas
- Egrets and water buffaloes
- Grouper fish and octopuses
- Warthogs and banded mongooses
- Oxpeckers and big mammals
- Goby fish and pistol shrimp
- (some) frogs and tarantulas
- Capybaras and wattled jacanas
- Remora fish and sharks
- Sea anemones and hermit crabs
- Elephants and baboons
- Caimans and butterflies
- Cleaner fish and ocean creatures
- Coyotes and (some) badgers
- Crocodiles and plovers
- Sloths and sloth moths
- Marine iguanas and lava lizards
- Anemones and clownfish
- Sally Lightfoot crabs and sea lions
- Deer and turkeys
- Squirrels and songbirds
- Golden jackals and tigers
- Burrowing owls and rattlesnakes
- Bushveld lizards and oogpister beetles
- Arctic foxes and caribou
- Beavers and frogs
- Atlantic puffins and rabbits
- Hoverflies and wasps
- Hermit crabs and sea snails
Sophie Corrigan is an illustrator and writer from Lancashire, who has a first class degree in illustration. When not drawing and painting, she enjoys going to shows, watching nature programmes and eating vegan food.
Nature’s Remarkable Partners is a fun book for young readers and two voices, peeking into mutually beneficially partnerships in nature – from butterflies and milkweed, to clownfish and anemones.
Children will enjoy poems that teach about the egg-laying carrion beetle and its hitchhiking mite passengers, and the little goby fish (that guards the pistol shrimp from predators, in exchange for a safe haven).
Brief science notes accompany each featured partnership, with back matter offering more opportunities for study.
To Have or to Hold (nature’s hidden relationships)
To Have or to Hold is a thrilling exploration of nature’s relationships, nominated for the Wainwright Prize. Learn about eight symbiotic relationships, trying to survive climate and biodiversity crises, to regulate ecosystems and strengthen resilience.
What can nature teach us, about living together? These relationships don’t happen by accident, there are dynamics involves. Species form (and sever) relationships everywhere, from temperate rainforests to the open ocean, and from quiet tidal pools to chalk grasslands.
In this book, Sophie travels (using low-carbon methods) around the British Isles to relish the inter-connectedness between species, and sharing some of their tales. A call to avoid exploiting nature’s resources, instead to love and cherish what remains, to shape a more restorative life alongside nature.
This miraculous book blindsided me. I raced through its pages as though reading a beautifully written thriller, while learning so much about things I never knew existed. Joanna Lumley
From mint-sauce worms (they are bright green due to algae!) to tree lungwort (toxic to pets), this is a glorious guide to coupling in the animal, plant and fungal kingdoms. Guy Shrubsole
She is one of the best nature writers of our time, her ability to make readers giggle and feel empowered and motivated to do something, is like no other. This is an absolute masterpiece. Megan McCubbin
Sophie Pavelle is a US-born science communicator who now lives here. She has done a lot of good work for wildlife (especially beavers) and her writing appears in many newspapers and magazines.
The Internet of Animals is an illuminating account of the untapped knowledge of the animal kingdom, from animal migration to how elephants can detect tsunamis. What do animals know that we don’t?
In this book, scientist Martin Wikelski argues that animals have a unique ‘sixth sense’. If we give animals a voice, our perception of the world could change forever.
As they tag animals around the world with tiny tracking devices and link their movements to the International Space Station, this taps into the ‘internet of animals’, an astonishing network of information made up of thousands of creatures communicating with each other and their environments.
This project ICARUS is poised to change the world. We learn how barnyard animals become restless when earthquakes are imminent, African animals sense when poachers are on the move and frigatebards in South America depart before hurricanes arrive.
We also now know that animal migrations are not triggered by genes encoded in DNA but by elaborate cultures. By learning from them, we can better prepare for earthquakes, floods and hurricanes – and also learn to live alongside animals in harmony.
Martin Wikelsi is director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour and honorary professor of ornithology at University of Konstanz.
