Sometimes, small predators are the most vicious. Praying mantises and black widow spiders have unique weapons to take down their prey. Readers will discover how these two animals use their secret weapons to get their next meal. Profiles and other features highlight special information about each animal. A final narrative puts a praying mantis and black widow spider up against each other. Which creature will remain standing?
"Amazing photography accompanies engaging information about the fighting abilities of praying mantises and black widow spiders. The combination of high-interest subject matter and light text is intended for students in grades 3 through 7" --
Don't say you weren't warned. Black widows have red markings that let you know they are dangerous. Bother a black widow and experience the effects of its potent poison. Get caught up in reading about the deadly black widow spider.
Scorpions and black widows are both feared arachnids. They carry venom that can be deadly. Black widow venom can turn their prey's insides into mush! Scorpions have their deadly stinger to inject their poison, while black widows use fangs. These two bad beasts occasionally meet in a battle to the death. Through enlightening text and vibrant photographs, readers will discover the weapons each uses to best its opponent and the adaptations that make them both predators you wouldn't want to mess with.
This eBook examines the infamous Black Widow Spider. It provides a direct analysis of the spider's behavioral patterns, venom toxicity, and general characteristics.
Get a bug's-eye-view on the life cycle of the praying mantis, in this hilarious, scientifically accurate Nature Diary following an insect through her whole summer. Finalist for the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books "May 17: I was born today! It's a beautiful, sunny spring day!" This is the diary of P. Mantis, one of 150 brothers and sisters born on a garden bush. P. Mantis is an amazing bug: she can make herself look like a stick to hide from predators, she can swivel her head all the way around, and when she's grown up she'll even be able to fly! In dated journal entries P. Mantis describes the entirety of her life, sharing the fun and beauty of her world as well its little ups and downs ("I ate one of my brothers. Okay, maybe two"). Colorful, bold art helps illustrate the different stages of the mantis life cycle, and the engaging, narrative text is paired with more detailed information about praying mantises on the heavily-illustrated endpapers. Washington Children's Choice Book Award 2019 Nominee A New York Public Library Staff Pick for Children Don't miss the other hilarious entries in The Nature Diary Series! Each one explores the life cycle of an animal in dated journal entries, showing young readers how they grow and change through the seasons-- and offering a few laughs, too! Brightly illustrated and vetted by experts, Paul Meisel's books are a perfect introduction to your backyard neighbors. My Happy Year by E. Bluebird A Junior Library Guild Selection My Stinky Summer by S. Bug A Junior Library Guild Selection
This photo-illustrated book for elementary readers describes the venomous black widow spider. Readers learn how these spiders use venom to kill prey and as a protection against predators. Also explains where they live and what to do when they are encountered.
What happens when a lightning-fast praying mantis stares down a hungry giant hornet? Fascinating photos and dynamic descriptions will give young bug-lovers an up-close look at these cunning predators to learn about their natural weapons, defences and abilities. Readers can then cheer on their favourite as these bugs battle for victory.
Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home. Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live." Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.
The natural world is filled with diverse—not to mention quirky and odd—animal behaviors. Consider the male praying mantis that continues to mate after being beheaded; the spiders, insects, and birds that offer gifts of food in return for sex; the male hip-pocket frog that carries his own tadpoles; the baby spiders that dine on their mother; the beetle that craves excrement; or the starfish that sheds an arm or two to escape a predator's grasp. Headless Males Make Great Lovers and Other Unusual Natural Histories celebrates the extraordinary world of animals with essays on curious creatures and their amazing behaviors. In five thematic chapters, Marty Crump—a tropical field biologist well known for her work with the reproductive behavior of amphibians—examines the bizarre conduct of animals as they mate, parent, feed, defend themselves, and communicate. Crump's enthusiasm for the unusual behaviors she describes-from sex change and free love in sponges to aphrodisiac concoctions in bats-is visible on every page, thanks to her skilled storytelling, which makes even sea slugs, dung beetles, ticks, and tapeworms fascinating and appealing. Steeped in biology, Headless Males Make Great Lovers points out that diverse and unrelated animals often share seemingly bizarre behaviors—evidence, Crump argues, that these natural histories, though outwardly weird, are successful ways of living. Illustrated throughout, and filled with vignettes of personal and scientific interest, Headless Males Make Great Lovers will enchant the general reader with its tales of blood-squirting horned lizards and intestine-ejecting sea cucumbers—all in the service of a greater appreciation of the diversity of the natural histories of animals.
