Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You: A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World

This “fact-filled and amusing trek through nature’s dark side” (Kirkus Reviews) reveals the fascinating, weird, and often perverted ways that Mother Nature fends only for herself.

It may be a wonderful world, but as Dan Riskin (host of the Animal Planet’s TV show Monsters Inside Me) explains, it’s also a dangerous, disturbing, and disgusting one. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to eat us, poison us, use our bodies as their homes, or have us spread their eggs. In Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You, Riskin is our tour guide through the natural world at its most gloriously ruthless.

Using the seven deadly sins as a road map, Riskin offers dozens of jaw-dropping examples that illuminate how brutal nature can truly be. From slothful worms that hide in your body for up to thirty years to wrathful snails with poisonous harpoons that can kill you in less than five minutes to lustful ducks that have orgasms faster than you can blink, these fascinating accounts reveal the candid truth about “gentle” Mother Nature’s true colors.

Riskin’s passion for the strange and his enthusiastic expertise bring Earth’s most fascinating fauna and flora into vivid focus. Through his adventures—which include sliding on his back through a thick soup of bat guano just to get face-to-face with a vampire bat, befriending a parasitic maggot that has taken root in his head, and coming to grips with having offspring of his own—Riskin makes unexpected discoveries not just about the world all around us but also about the ways this brutal world has shaped us as humans and what our responsibilities are to this terrible, wonderful planet we call home.

Dan Riskin is an evolutionary biologist and passionate ambassador of science to popular audiences. Since 2011, Riskin has cohosted the world’s only hour-long daily science show, Daily Planet, on Discovery Canada. He is also the host of Animal Planet’s wildly successful show Monsters Inside Me, about parasites. He lives in Toronto.

ISBN: 9781476707556
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: January 06, 2015

“A fact-filled and amusing trek through nature’s dark side that adroitly combines learning and the yuck factor.”“[An] absorbing and witty, if sometimes stomach-churning, catalog of nature’s more gruesome proclivities. . . . Riskin’s book is an entertaining and informative close-up look at the ingenious tricks nature’s creatures use to survive.”"Can a book about vampire bats and necrophiliac frogs be an uplifting experience? When Dan Riskin writes it, yes. Mother Nature Is Trying To Kill You is a no-holds romp through life's nasty, creepy, and otherwise fascinating corners.""I am in awe of Dan's ability to make the most disgusting and repulsive things seem fascinating and, frankly, beautiful. I wish he'd write the press releases for my show. This is very cool.""You have to love Dan Riskin's Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You. It's eye-opening, hair-raising, and engaging science, all at the same time. A fascinating tour of the often ghoulish strategies nature devises to help creatures unmask, do-in, and otherwise wreak havoc with you, me, and nearly every other living thing on the planet. The research is exhaustive and surprising, yet fun and accessible. Along the way readers get a fresh, first-hand view of the inventive ways the evolutionary sweepstakes works.”"Calling all science geeks! A fascinating and funny look at some of the fantastic and frightening aspects of the ‘natural’ world. You will laugh, you will learn, you may even throw up a little in your mouth. Required reading, if you like things that are good.""Well worth reading. Full of fascinating facts and intriguing tales that will ensure you never look at nature in quite the same way again."“Wildlife lovers, in an effort to dispel the idea that we are dominant over the earth, have tried to portray ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ as beautiful, peaceful things. Dan Riskin reveals the folly of that by showing us that not only are other organisms trying to take us down – in myriad ways – but in their spare time, trying to get each other. Peaceful? Ha!”"Pride and envy, lust and sloth—in Riskin's evolutionary romp, not deadly sins, but virtues learned at Mother Nature's knee."