Animal Biology

This audiobook features music and special effects. Listen along and enjoy the fun that is Honey Bee (Young Zoologist). Journey into a beehive to study honey bees in this beautiful nonfiction field guide for kids. You might know that honey bees dance to let each other know where to find the best...

The first definitive natural history of the Indian subcontinent. Did you know that the exquisite caves of Ellora were hewn from rock formed in the greatest lava floods the world has known—eruptions so enormous that they may well have obliterated dinosaurs? Or that Bengaluru owes its unique...

A search for the meaning of one of nature's greatest riddles: why do so many creatures transform? “How many creatures walking on this earth / Have their first being in another form?” the Roman poet Ovid asked two thousand years ago. He could not have known the full extent of the truth: today...

Drawing on more than three decades of experience writing about sharks and other marine animals, the bestselling author of Jaws combines high adventure with practical information in a book that is at once a thriller and a valuable guide to being safe in, on, under, and around the sea. “Shark...

While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can't compare to those of other animals. For instance: the male garden spider spontaneously dies after mating with a female more than fifty times his size. Female cichlids must guard their eggs and larvae--even from the hungry appetites of their own partners. And male blanket octopuses employ a copulatory arm longer than their own bodies to mate with females that outweigh them by four orders of magnitude. Why do these gender gulfs exist?

With three hearts and blue blood, its gelatinous body unconstrained by jointed limbs or gravity, the octopus seems to be an alien, an inhabitant of another world. It’s baggy, boneless body sprouts eight arms covered with thousands of suckers—suckers that can taste as well as feel. The...

Hear a day in the life of the Amazonian rainforest, a continuous sequence of beautiful and exotic sounds. From dawn to dusk the magic of the forest unfolds, with rare birds, monkeys, insects, frogs and toads. There is an afternoon equatorial rainstorm and the evening chorus of birds once the storm has passed. The recordings have no spoken announcements, so the download can be used for relaxation and background sounds at home.

A major new book overturning our assumptions about how evolution works Earth’s natural history is full of fascinating instances of convergence: phenomena like eyes and wings and tree-climbing lizards that have evolved independently, multiple times. But evolutionary biologists also point...

Field notes from an age of extinction, tracking the ever-shifting meaning of America’s animals throughout history to understand the current moment Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals—butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual...

A wildlife expert explores what science tells us about animals as unique individuals and why animal personality matters for the human-animal bond and for adaptation in nature. Why are some cats cuddly and others standoffish? Why are some dogs adventuresome, others homebodies? As any pet owner...

In Once and Future Giants, science writer Sharon Levy digs through the evidence surrounding Pleistocene large animal ("megafauna") extinction events worldwide, showing that understanding this history - and our part in it - is crucial for protecting the elephants, polar bears, and other great creatures at risk today. These surviving relatives of the Ice Age beasts now face an intensified replay of that great die-off, as our species usurps the planet's last wild places while driving a warming trend more extreme than any in mammalian history.

A fascinating, entertaining dive into the long-standing relationship between humans and insects, revealing the surprising ways we depend on these tiny, six-legged creatures. Insects might make us shudder in disgust, but they are also responsible for many of the things we take for granted in our...

Noted science writer Virginia Morell explores the frontiers of research on animal cognition and emotion, offering a surprising and moving exploration into the hearts and minds of wild and domesticated animals. Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a fish? Or a parrot, dolphin, or...

No land is sacred in this cinematic breathtaking thriller, capturing a Brazilian community in crisis and the three women caught in the crossfire as an environmental tragedy unfolds in real time. On the lush Brazil-Argentina border, whispers of greed run deep, finally having come to claim the...

Environmental journalist Alix Morris spends an eye-opening year getting to know these elusive, intelligent creatures, investigating the effects of their extraordinary return from the brink of extinction and how we can try to bring nature back into balance. It might be their large, strangely...

From split-gill mushrooms to duck-billed platypuses, the spectacular science of sexual reproduction and creation of biodiversity on Earth Let’s talk about sex. Not boring, human sex, but the endlessly fascinating, varied, and complex forms of reproduction in the rest of the natural world...

From Susan Casey, the New York Times bestselling author of The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth, a breathtaking journey through the extraordinary world of dolphins Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness...

‘Full of wonder and forensic intelligence’ Isabella Tree, author of Wilding A moving account of Madagascar told by a researcher who has spent over fifty years investigating the mysteries of this remarkable island. Madagascar is a place of change. A biodiversity hotspot and the fourth largest...

From dinosaurs fighting to their deaths to elephant-sized burrowing ground sloths, this book takes listeners on a global journey deep into the earth's past. Locked in Time showcases fifty of the most astonishing fossils ever found, brought together in five fascinating chapters that offer an unprecedented glimpse at the real-life behaviors of prehistoric animals.

What do you know about starfish? Beginning listeners will get their feet wet with these literacy-building introductions to ocean animals.