Sex on Six Legs by Marlene Zuk (thoughts)

I love popular science books, especially those with a natural history bent. So when this book, all about insects, popped up on Netgalley I couldn’t resist! And as soon as I began it, I realised I would love it. Zuk is passionate about her subject, which despite the title includes many aspects of insect life, and she’s able to convey that passion to her readers. She’s a biologist, rather than a science writer, but the book has a wonderful flow to it and her attempts at humour actually work. ;) There are several fascinating studies/experiments described, which my armchair scientist self very much enjoyed, and Zuk goes beyond insects to look at wider biological implications, including those for our own species. The book is obviously written to convince readers that bugs are important, and fascinating, and have lives as complicated (albeit in a different form) as our own, and it succeeds admirably. There’s a variety of species discussed, from the everyday North American to the more exotic, and I learned why fruit flies are so important to scientific studies. When I turned the final page, I let out a contented sigh before popping over to my library catalogue to make sure they had a copy of her earlier book, Riddled With Life. Definitely another author to add to my ‘go-to’ popular science list, and one I’d highly recommend for those looking for smart, readable, fun nonfiction! (If I don’t sound gushy enough, I read this back in June before I learned to look at pub dates on Netgalley, and now the publisher has blocked the file so I can’t look at it to refresh my memory/share a passage/etc. But I did love it! Oh, and there are fun little sketches throughout.)

Suggested Companion Reads

• Microcosm by Carl Zimmer (Just as Zuk makes insects fascinating, Zimmer makes the scientific study of e. coli riveting.)
• Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson (Another evolutionary biologist writing well about sex and various species, this time from all over the animal kingdom.)
• The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (Published in 1998, so a bit dated but still interesting, this outlines the red queen theory of sexual selection/competition, essentially trying to answer why sex evolved as a means of reproduction.)
• Woman: an Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier (Read this if you read The Red Queen to get a different, more current, view on theories of human sexual selection, especially ideas like the grandmother hypothesis.)