What unites us with frogs ferrying tadpoles on their backs, beetles regurgitating food into the mouths of their larvae, or a shorebird luring a predator away from her nest by pretending her wing is broken? Creatures around the world have strategies to keep their offspring alive that are varied and surprising - and often familiar.
In this compelling and entertaining study, science journalist Elizabeth Preston explores the biology, brain circuitry, and behaviours we share with species across the animal kingdom that care for young. In the field and in the lab, readers will also meet scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding these animals, often while juggling families of their own.
Alongside animal parents that range from lonely octopuses to warfare-waging mongooses, we'll encounter our own species in a new way. Elizabeth Preston argues that Homo sapiens' history of caring for children cooperatively has left a legacy in all of us, parents and non-parents alike, and is the basis for our caring human society.
'Elizabeth Preston is an engaging, brilliant, often hilarious guide to the WTF world of non-human parenting. This book is astonishing - for the breadth of Preston's research and the eye-opening, jaw-dropping things it uncovers- dads who incubate their young in their throats and burp them out. Babies that survive by peeling and eating their mother's skin. Gender-changing fish! Lactating male bats! The message is clear- there is no one way to be a parent. A must read for mothers (and fathers) and everyone who has one.'
-Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Replaceable You
'Leave your anthropocentric illusions behind and join science writer Elizabeth Preston in her disarming practice of identifying with other parents, whether fish, fowl, insect or mammal. In return, you will be mightily entertained, and also likely to come away sharing Preston's conviction that acts of caring by fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents and caretakers of every ilk laid the groundwork for the evolution of our own peculiarly social and cooperative species, Homo sapiens.'
-Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and Father Time
