The world is tough, and you have to be tough to survive. How animals survive is as diverse as the animals themselves. The prime goals of any organism are to live and reproduce. While my research has focused on the latter function, it was refreshing and exhilarating to read about the former.

Strange Survivors takes us on a journey through the unique ways animals defend themselves using weapons, defense mechanisms, behaviors, and so much more. In particular, Pagán focuses on electrical signals animals can produce, venom and poison, the use of time by animals, and how cooperation between animals can lead to higher survival.

There are several particular facets of this book as a whole that I really appreciated, both as an avid reader and as a scientist myself. First off, Pagán’s introduction to evolution was one of the best I have read in a popular science book, especially for one of its scale. He did a marvelous job of tying it into the bigger picture and connecting it to each chapter. Second, Pagán’s use of examples must be applauded. While I had heard of some of the systems he described, many of them were new to me, which made the content even more precious to me. This isn’t a book that just rehashes everything that has already been said, it brings many new things to the table! A surely enjoyable read for anyone who is fascinated by the world around us.

*I would like to thank the publisher, author, and NetGalley for providing an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*

This book wasn't quite what I was expecting, though I'm by no means disappointed. I was expecting a book chock full of anecdotes and examples of animals with weird and wonderful survival techniques but this book focused more on the bigger picture of evolution and animal survival tactics. A lot of these concepts are already familiar to me but the author manages to be so entertaining that it doesn't feel too much like a repetition.

Pagan's enthusiasm for all things biological is contagious - he gets giddy about the intricacies of evolution and throws in subtle puns wherever and whenever possible.

Apart from the broad strokes of evolution and the science of survival, there are some real life examples which was what I was hoping for when picking up this book - electric eels, mantis shrimp, toxic snails and... AND.... did anyone else know that slow lorises were venomous and have caused human fatalities?!


The generous use of citations and footnotes in this book are going to be an excellent introduction for science undergrads of the future! If you want to learn about the 'why' and 'how' of survival strategies, as well as the 'what', this is the perfect choice.

One R. Pagan is a university biology professor and a blogger, and both sides come out in this entertainingly informative look at the various ways life tries to, well, stay alive (i.e. not get eaten). As he says in the introduction, he “wrote this book with the semi-mythical ‘interested layperson’ in mind . . . [so] I will not be excessively technical, but neither will I be patronizing . . . I’ve tried to write as if we were having a conversation over coffee.” Thus, like most writers of popular science, Pagan is aiming at that sweet spot where he doesn’t lose his reader jargon or overly-abstruse concepts or talk to his readers as if they struggled to complete elementary school. And for the most part he hits it, though at times he’s a bit too folksy for me in some of his direct addresses and I wouldn’t have minded a little more technical science here and there. There’s also a bit of a blog-ish feel to the organization, which can at times be a bit disjointed. But overall it’s a concise and interesting book that holds one’s attention while revealing in enthusiastic fashion the wonder of the world around us.

The early parts of the book (chapters one and two) are the most difficult and dense in terms of hard science, though Pagan is a good, clear guide as he leads the reader through the basics of evolution, DNA, phenotypes and genotypes, gene expression, amino acids and proteins, ATP, metabolism, and programmed cell death.

Chapter Three, offers up a brief introductory segment on how electricity works, then moves into its usage in the animal world via the electric catfish, electric rays, and of course, the electric eel (noting it is in fact a knifefish and not an eel). Pagan roves pretty widely in time interesting fashion, noting Egyptian art depicting electric creatures, Arabic and Roman texts explaining their medical uses, Alexander Von Humboldt’s 1800’s encounter with South Americans “fishing with horses” for electric eels, Darwin’s later confusion over the evolutionary benefits of weakly electric fish, and 20th century experiments into bioelectricity. All of this woven into a concise but detailed explanation of how bioelectricity works, the organs that create the force, and the ways in which various creatures benefit from it, including one benefit wholly unfamiliar to me — regeneration. This leads into one of the more fascinating if at times grisly description of those lucky animals that can regrow limbs, eyes, “and in a pinch, even parts of the very hearts and brains.” And that’s not even getting into the sponges and hydrae, who can apparently have their cells “completely disassociated . . . then pass [ed] through a mesh” and still reform entirely new sponges and hydrae. Planarians (flatworms) aren’t quite that good, but despite having a brain (albeit a truly tiny one), that can be cut into a piece “smaller than a grain of salt” and still “regenerate into a whole organism.

Chapter Four looks at the topic of venom across the animal kingdom and as far back as the time of the dinosaurs, looking into some still-controversial theories that at least some dinosaurs, based on somewhat-open-to-interpretation fossil evidence may have been venomous. After a bit of a digression into the dinosaurs, Pagan distinguishes for the reader amongst poisons, toxins, and venoms and explaining some of the effects and mechanisms of delivery. He then goes into more detail regarding poisonous amphibians such as dart/arrow frogs and some newts. There’s bit of a diversion into the great toxic oxygen event of several billion years ago, then we return to more specific animal examples, first involving arthropods (including a great example of a scorpion that stings with a weaker “warning shot” venom first and then a deadly follow-up for the predator too stupid to back off). Leeches are a surprising inclusion, as most don’t think of them as “venomous,” though they do use it to hide what they’re doing by masking the pain or preventing a sudden noticeable inflammation as they feed. Here again we rove back in time, looking at leeches use for medical purposes (Pagan notes they’re still used today, one of two animals designate “medical device” by the FDA). Birds are also a bit of a surprise entry. Other animals discussed include shrew, platypuses, bats, corals, and the loris with its oddly placed venom glans (near the elbows—they have to lick them to mix it into their saliva before biting).

Chapter Five deals with speed, beginning with perhaps a somewhat unnecessary digression into planetary spin and other “movements,” before going into the ways jellyfish and similar organisms use fast-working nematocysts (or cnidocysts) to sting their prey, an action that takes on average only seven nanoseconds (roughly half a million firings per human eyeblink). Then we get to mantis shrimp whose punches are so incredibly fast they create a pulverizing shock wave that allows them to smash through the hard outer shells of their snails and crabs. In another one of those fascinating but slightly odd spins down another road, Pagan goes into a discussion here of color vision, the way rods and cones work, and then how mantis shrimp “have possibly the highest number of photoreceptor types of any organism even studied.” After this momentary sidetrack, we turn to a creature that Pagan says is “very close to my heart” — the cone snail, one species of which is so venomous it kills 70 percent of people who go untreated. Spiders and velvet worms round out the chapter, with excursion to the Cambrian Explosion, water bears, and a few other side topics.

The closing section deals with “the very best survival tactic of them all” — cooperation. Examples in the biological world include forms of symbiosis, such as cleaner fish (including some whose hosts — moray eels — apparently aren’t quite as trustworthy as is typical in such relationships), bacterial cooperation in the form of slimes, biofilms, and an explanation of the endosymbiont theory of how eukaryotes (multi-celled) organisms arose. Stepping up into larger, more complex creatures, we also get the “poster kids” of superorganisms: ants, termites, bees, and wasps. One example of cooperation offered here is how hundreds of Japanese bees will sacrifice themselves to save the hive by forming a “bee ball” around invading hornets (many times their size) to kill them via heat and carbon dioxide poisoning. Pagan closes with a brief discussion of human cooperation.

Anyone still interested in the topic shouldn’t skip the postscript or notes sections, where Pagan continues to offer up more interesting tidbits, as well as pointing readers to other sources of information.


As noted, sometimes the organization is a little choppy, at times he’s more informal than I would have preferred, but Pagan’s enthusiasm and sense of wonder are evident throughout and highly contagious. Recommended.

Excellent look at animal adaptations

I enjoyed this book. It is a fascinating look at adaptations in animals that favor survival. It is obvious from the way he writes, that author Oné R. Pagán loves what he does. He writes with a great sense of humor and in a very conversational manner. If there is one flaw in the book, it is that the writing, on occasion, can come across as condescending. This did not, however, lessen my enjoyment of the book and I recommend it for anyone who likes science.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.

I love books about weird biology. Whether it's about fungi that can turn ants into zombies, how lobsters have sex, or the resurgence of bedbugs, I eat that sort of thing up with a spoon. I just adore collecting gross trivia and fascinating tidbits about animals, plants, and all the other forms of life on Earth.

Strange Survivors is an excellent example of this genre I've just invented, this time focusing on how predators predate and how prey escapes. Each chapter is themed around a particular method: producing or detecting electricity, toxins and venoms, speed (less cheetahs and falcons and more the nanoseconds it takes a jellyfish to sting or the bullet-like force delivered by a mantis shrimp as it smashes a shell), and cooperation (such as slime molds banding together to form a larger organism or bees killing much larger hornets by swarming them). Pagan delivers a huge array of excellently weird biology. I don't want to turn this review into a long list of examples, so I'll restrain myself to just one, my favorite new fact: did you know that there is a genus of spiders that spit their webs at their victims, and the webs themselves contain venom!?!? If you, like me, think spitting spiders armed with sticky-venom-nets is a super cool fact, Strange Survivors is the book for you.

I do have some minor critiques. It's a fairly short book (170 pages of text), made shorter by the fact that Pagan chooses to spend the first two chapters on the basics of evolution and DNA. These chapters are well-written, but I think most of the potential audience for a book like this already has a general understanding of those topics and just wants to get to the weird biology facts. Certainly I did! Pagan also has perhaps a bit too much fondness for exclamation points, but overall I enjoyed his enthusiastic and conversational style.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2327798292

I have mixed feelings about this book.

Although I did find it very interesting, the text seemed a bit disjointed. Some of the information was related in a more technical way while some of it was stated a bit too casually. I found some innaccuracies and some areas where anthropomorphism was used - one particular statement seemed quite strange in a scientific text, even one meant for the general public : "... shake their heads in a rather "emphatic" way, as if they were annoyed...", " ... either this a "newer" relationship in the evolutionary sense or else the moray eels are really, really mean fish". I'm probably nitpicking but I do have a scientific background and am a translator so I tend to notice details.

One of my favourite parts of the book was the one on cone snails. The author stated that these organisms are close to his heart and I think this came through in the text. Who knew such small creatures could be so interesting!

Only so much material can be covered in a book this size. I'm sure volume upon volume could be written on the strange and fascinating animals that inhabit this earth. For that reason, I think that some sections might not have been necessary or were talked about in too much depth - evolution, genetics, cell biology and how eukaryotes came to be, for example. I didn't find these uninteresting (and I appreciated the refresher courses as my university days are quite far in the past), but I wish the author would have fit in more information on some other intriguing organisms. He does provide many references and recommendations for further reading so I might check out some of these.

All in all this book was interesting and I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about our planet's strange creatures.

An interesting book for anyone curious about how life on our planet has evolved to survive and continues to change.
It's written to be like a casual chat with a science enthusiast. Unfortunate!y, this casual chat is distracting as it goes on tangents. The author eventually gets back on track and becomes an enjoyable read that lightly touches on many topics

Strange Survivors is a top line ode to the unmeasured variety of life on Earth. Dr. Oné Pagán absolutely loves the variety, and continually seems thrilled to point out different species and how they approach survival. There are wonders galore. We have only just begun to examine (let alone understand) the blizzard of life forms on this planet. Pagan gives us glimpses:

-There are flatworms that can regenerate an entirely new , whole flatworm if just a scrap of it is left over.
-Electric eels can generate 800 volts from muscles arranged like a battery. We have yet to determine how and why they don’t shock themselves to death in the water.
-There is a jellyfish that when stressed, reverts to its birth size and state, and begins its life all over again.
-Certain newts can poke their ribs out through their skin, coating them with venom hidden there. As a good as any sci-fi special effects.
-200 species of spider fire their webs at prey, like Spider-Man. Some of the webs shrink and harden, some contain toxins. Or both.
-A hornet can kill 40 bees in a minute, but up to 500 bees can surround a hornet and generate so much heat and humidity that the hornet dies.
-Co-operative and collective ant colonies have been measured as high as 300 million ants in 45,000 connected nests.

Pagán fairly gushes over these tactics. He is as enthusiastic as anyone can be without losing credibility. But the book really doesn’t dig deep – the topic is way too broad for that. It seems to be an intro for say, high schoolers ,to get hooked in the magic of biology.

David Wineberg