A
bout
the
A
uthor
Ann Downer was born in Virginia and spent part of her childhood in the Philippines and
in Thailand. She worked on many books about invertebrates when she was a life science
editor for Harvard University Press. She is the author of fantasy novels for young readers
and of several books about science, including the award-winning YA nonfiction titles
Wild
Animal Neighbors: Sharing Our Urban World
and
Elephant Talk: The Surprising Science
of Elephant Communication
, both for Twenty-First Century Books. Downer lives outside
Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and teenage son.
A
uthor
A
cknowledgments
All institutions are in the United States unless otherwise noted.
Introduction:
Aurore Avarguès-Weber, University of London, United Kingdom; Ian
Meinertzhagen, Dalhousie University, Canada.
Earthworms:
Tim Berra, Ohio State
University; Janet Browne and Katie Ericsen Baca, Harvard University.
Portia the jumping
spider:
Robert R. Jackson, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Duane Harland,
AgResearch–Lincoln Campus, New Zealand; Elizabeth Jakob, University of Massachusetts
Amherst.
Octopus:
Lauren de Vos, Save Our Seas, South Africa; Julian Finn, Museum
Victoria, Australia; Ian Gleadall, Tohoku University, Japan; Michael Kuba, Max Planck
Institute for Brain Research, Germany; Jennifer Mather, University of Lethbridge,
Canada.
Honey bees and paper wasps:
Thomas D. Seeley, Cornell University; Elizabeth
Tibbetts, University of Michigan; Sean O’Donnell, Drexel University.
Argentine ants:
Mark W. Moffett, Smithsonian (National Museum of Natural History); Mike Rubenstein,
Harvard University; Neil Tsutsui, University of California, Berkeley.
Mantis shrimp:
Jay Bradley, National Aquarium, Baltimore; Roy L. Caldwell, University of California,
Berkeley; Suzanne Cox, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Charles Derby, George State
University; Michael F. Land, University of Sussex, U.; Sheila N. Patek, Duke University.
Box jellyfish:
Anders Garm, Lund University, Sweden.
Slime mold:
Toshiyuki Nakagaki,
Hokkaido University, Japan.
Dragonflies:
Steven Wiederman, University of Adelaide,
Australia; David O’Carroll, University of Adelaide, Australia; Paloma T. Conzalez-Bellido,
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Any errors that remain are my own.
A big shout-out to Mary Sears at the Ernst Mayr Library at Harvard for tracking down the
nationality of an earthworm researcher and many other favors.
I would also like to thank my fabulous editor at Twenty-First Century Books, Domenica
Di Piazza. She did yeoman’s work on this manuscript and made it a better book in so
many ways.
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