Series: How Nature Works

Blowholes, Book Gills, and Butt-Breathers explores a question unasked by any other book for young readers: What can we learn about nature and evolution from the bizarre and exotic ways some animals have evolved to get life-giving oxygen? An inquiry-based book designed to stimulate active minds; a STEM standout from a celebrated nature photographer and writer.

Blowholes, Book Gills, and Butt-Breathers explores a question unasked by any other book for young readers: What can we learn about nature and evolution from the bizarre and exotic ways some animals have evolved to get life-giving oxygen? An inquiry-based book designed to stimulate active minds; a STEM standout from a celebrated nature photographer and writer.

Poop—guano, to be more specific—and a lot of it. The culprit, she suspected, was a previously unnoticed colony of penguins. A big one. And their favourite food appeared to be pink krill. For a closer look, Heather built a team for an expedition to the Danger Islands, an area notorious for its unpredictable sea ice. Their mission was to count...

Natural selection and speciation are all but ignored in children's nonfiction. To help address this glaring deficiency, award-winning children's science writer Sneed Collard travelled to the Galapagos Islands to see for himself, where Charles Darwin saw, how new species form. The result is this fascinating story of two species of iguana, one land-based and one marine, both of which developed...

From zooplankton to phytoplankton, these small-scale superheroes are the foundation of the ocean's food chain, keep our climate in check, generate up to fifty percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year-and much more. Stunning microscopic photos and primary source research provide a seldom seen look at these dynamic drifters. "Science interpreter," Mary Cerullo, dives into the wet...

Scorpions and brown recluse spiders are fine as far as they go, but if you want daily contact with venomous creatures, the ocean is the place to be. Blue-ringed octopi, stony corals, sea jellies, stonefish, lionfish, poison-fanged blennies, stingrays, cone snails, blind remipedes, and fire urchins—you can choose your poison in the ocean. Venoms are often, but not always, defensive...

North America's flying squirrels and Australia's sugar gliders notwithstanding, the vast majority of them live in rainforests. Illustrated with arresting photographs, Catching Air takes us around the world to meet these animals, learn why so many gliders live in Southeast Asia, and find out why this gravity-defying ability has evolved in Draco lizards, snakes, and frogs as well as mammals....

More than 99 percent of all life forms have gone extinct during the 3.6-billion-year history of life on Earth. Other organisms have changed dramatically, but not our extreme survivors. Evolution may have altered their physiology and behaviour, but their body plans have stood the test of time. How have these living links with Earth's prehistoric past survived? The search for...