Happy Halloween, But Animals Are Horrifying Year-Round

From tongue-replacing parasites to zombie-making wasps, Mother Nature does Halloween better than anyone.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Life in the wild is no idyllic picnic. Death can come from anywhere, which is why squirrels are constantly watching the sky, deer can’t take more than two bites without scanning the horizon for predators, and grasshoppers have evolved the ability to spring off into the unknown at the slightest sign of trouble.

But there are actually fates worse than death. Take the tongue-eating isopod, for instance:

Read more about that creepy little devil in a story I wrote for Smithsonian Magazine: “Hollywood Has Nothing on These Real Life Halloween Horror Shows”

Real-life Zombies

And then there’s the emerald jewel wasp. Though these insects are teeny-tiny, and an other-worldly kind of beautiful, they have a dark side.

Read more about those little monsters in a post I did to accompany a New York Times piece, which is paywalled: “Happy Halloween From This Heart-Eating Wasp”

Eight-Legged Freaks?

Do spiders freak you out? Don’t worry, even a lot of scientists admit that there’s just something creepy about all those legs. But spiders can also be wildly beautiful. For some spidey appreciation, check out this piece I got to write about Javier Aznar’s stunning spider photographs for National Geographic Magazine: “A mesmerizing look at nature's eight-legged wonders”

Finger of Death

Everybody loves lemurs, right? Well, in some parts of Madagascar, one lemur species is not so beloved. In fact, legend says that if an aye-aye points its long, bony finger at you, you will soon die. And people actually sometimes kill the things on sight rather than face being cursed.

Of course, those weird digits aren’t for witchcraft. They’re for hooking and drawing grubs out of deep crevices, and honestly, one of the coolest evolutionary adaptations you’ll find anywhere. I wrote about all of this for the now-dead Pacific Standard, but fortunately you can still read the story, and for free!

“The Aye-Aye and the Finger of Death”

The Monster Within

Of course, all of us are walking around with a fully-grown monster inside us. It’s our skeleton.

Adult humans have 206 bones, but kids have about 300 “bone parts”, since all of their skeleton isn’t yet connected. And while bones are often associated with the dead, your bones are very much alive, and they have jobs to do, like pumping out immune cells that help you fight off infection.

Anyway, please enjoy this fun little story I wrote for the Washington Post’s KidsPost section:

“Celebrate your skeleton this Halloween”

Book News

I also have some insanely cool and fun and exciting news on the book front with National Geographic.

We have a new title. We have a new illustration style. And I can’t share either of them with you yet, but oh my, YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE IT!

But for now, it’s back to work. Happy Halloween, everyone!