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EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY Strange Survivors
How Organisms
Evolution’s amazing arms race Attack and Defend
in the Game of Life
Oné R. Pagán
A friendly tour of unusual animal adaptations misses BenBella Books, 2018.
240 pp.
many highlights

By Christopher Kemp toxin. We meet venomous shrews; mantis survival strategies are concerned, the Tree
shrimp armed with percussively powerful of Life is heavy with fruit. No one would ex-
he Iberian ribbed newt (Pleurodeles limbs; electric eels, capable of generating pect a single book to be exhaustive—Pagán
waltl) is an evolutionary biologist’s 800 volts of electricity; and toxic birds, himself admits that the book contains but a
dream. Unremarkable in appearance, such as the pitohui of New Guinea, which “small fraction” of unusual survival strate-
with rough slate-colored skin, it’s not only are inedible but also can cause gies employed by animals—but he fails to
found across the Iberian Peninsula sneezing, stinging, nausea, and numbness mention so many candidates that eventually
T and southward in Morocco. Non- when handled. one becomes aware of their omission.
descript perhaps, but the newt is superla- The first chapter is a primer on evolution; There are almost 70 species of flying fish
tive. When threatened, its ribs puncture the second provides an outline of important belonging to the Exocoetidae family, that,
the sides of its body like a row of defensive biological concepts such as DNA, metabo- when threatened, leap from the water and
spears. At the same time, it releases venom lism, replication, life, and death. Frustrat- fly using long winglike fins, for instance.
that coats its newly exposed ribs. ingly, though, examples of the strange They can remain airborne for more than
Elsewhere, evolution has resulted in highly evolved species that fill the book’s 40 seconds and fly for hundreds of feet.
countless other species with survival strate- later chapters are few and far between. This But Pagán doesn’t mention them. Downloaded from
gies as strange as, or stranger than, the Ibe- is a mistake. It’s too much to ask a reader He doesn’t mention the bombardier
rian ribbed newt’s. West Chester University to digest nearly 50 pages of background in- beetle either, which defends itself with an
biologist Oné R. Pagán describes many of formation with only a glimpse at the orga- almost-boiling cloud of noxious gas that ex-
them in Strange Survivors. nisms alluded to in the book’s title. plodes from its abdomen. Or the boxer crabs
of the Lybia genus, which hold a sea anem-
one in each claw, like colorful pom-poms,
The slow loris produces a potent to help them catch prey. Or Octopoteuthis
toxin in glands on its arms. deletron, a squid that willfully detaches one http://science.sciencemag.org/
of its arms to confuse predators.
He doesn’t discuss the defensive strat-
egies of the skunk or the porcupine. He
doesn’t mention mimicry at all, missing an
opportunity to highlight the elephant hawk
moth (Deilephila elpenor) caterpillar, which
resembles a snake, and the larvae of the al-
der moth (Acronicta alni), which look like on March 1, 2018
bird droppings.
He doesn’t mention camouflage either,
neglecting the chameleons and cephalo-
pods that change color so that they match
their surroundings; the stick insects that
evolved, over millions of years, to become
indistinguishable from the tree branches on
An expert in flatworms, Pagán intro- Scientific writing—even when it is in- which they stand; and the stonefish, which
duces us to a variety of creatures well tended for a lay audience—requires preci- resembles, well, a stone.
practiced in attacking and defending them- sion. Instead of specifics, however, Pagán A better book would have mentioned at
selves, from cone snails and jellyfish to often resorts to generalities, describing a least some of these incredible strategies,
poison toads and spitting spiders. There cell membrane as “rather versatile,” a snail’s even briefly, in a bid to illustrate the rich-
is the slow loris (Nycticebus genus), a noc- venom-injecting mechanism as “rather so- ness of biodiversity that surrounds us. Re-
turnal primate from Southeast Asia that phisticated,” and a fish’s startle response gardless, it is clear that Pagán cares deeply
produces a two-stage toxin in glands on its as “rather useful.” The text is punctuated for his subject. Even in its incompleteness,
arms. When it licks the already-poisonous throughout with clichés, another sign of im- his book sent me on a careful search for the
toxin from its glands, the loris’s saliva acti- precision, including: “to be fair,” “come to creatures he omitted.
vates it and makes it more potent still. Like think of it,” “truth be told,” and “by the way.” As rabbit holes go, it was a pleasant one,
many species, it is unaffected by its own The book’s many footnotes, several of which riddled with strange and sinuous half-
send the reader on a detour to the bottom of hidden tunnels. Searches like that are filled
the page only to find an unnecessary aside with meaning. That alone may be enough PHOTO: ISTOCK.COM/FREDER
The reviewer is the author of The Lost Species: about Star Trek, are a bit tiring. reason to read Strange Survivors. j
Great Expeditions in the Collections of Natural History
Museums (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017). Strange Survivors also falls short on a
Email: cjkemp@gmail.com more fundamental level. As far as unusual 10.1126/science.aar6211

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