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When Lunch Fights Back: Wickedly Clever Animal Defenses

Written by Rebecca L. Johnson
Millbrook Press          9/1/2015
978-1-4677-2109-7
Nonfiction Picture Book
48 pages       Age 9 to 14

A Junior Library Guild Selection

“In nature, good defenses can mean the difference between surviving a predator’s attack and becoming its lunch. Some animals rely on sharp teeth and claws or camouflage. But that’s only the beginning. Meet creatures with some of the strangest defenses known to science. How strange? Hagfish that can instantaneously produce oodles of gooey, slippery slime; frogs that poke their own toe bones through their skin to create claws; young birds that shoot streams of stinking poop; and more.” [book jacket]

Review 
“On Earth the challenge of survival is a real and serious business. In the wild, every living thing is constantly at risk of being eaten by something else.”

Life is a bed of strange abilities as explored in When Lunch Fights Back. These animals—and one plant—have incredible defense mechanisms. You will wonder what other odd defense mechanisms other animals might possess. I do. It also made me wonder why humans have limited natural defense abilities. Hitting, screaming, and kicking are all fine defenses, but wouldn’t it be fantastic to have some of these abilities.

1. Cover your predator with thick, slimy, goo. (Atlantic Hagfish)
2. Extend your fingers so the bones protrude through the skin like sharp claws. (African Hairy Frog)
3. Bulge out your eyes and shoot a deadly stream of blood into a predator’s mouth. (Texas Horned Lizard)

Stuff of science fiction? Nope. When Lunch Fights Back contains animals with these abilities and much more. This nonfiction picture book for older kids is a fascinating read. There is enough “yuck” to entertain kids and the author supplies the science behind those incredible abilities, making this a great adjunct text for science teachers. Author notes, a glossary, index, bibliography, and extra resources are included.

Johnson writes in a manner that should be accessible to most middle grade aged kids. She introduces researchers and scientist in the “Science Behind the Story” sections. There is so much to learn and see it just might develop a child’s interest in the natural word. If the title does not peak a child’s interest, the images will. The color photographs highlight the noxious defenses and info-boxes give additional information about each animal (scientific name, location, habitat, and size).

Still, would it not be terrific if humans could spew putrid contents at a predator, much like a fulmar? Or, and this is a tad gross, turn our other check and “shoot streams of foul-smelling feces” at an attacker, much like a hoopoe chick can do? If you had the ability to slime an attacker, like the hagfish (aka “snot eel”), I doubt anyone would mess with you.

When Lunch Fights Back: Wickedly Clever Animal Defenses is an amazing look into some crazy species. Kids will love this book and teachers can use that interest to bring out the zoologist, biologist, or naturalist in her (or his) students. While a tad gross, and most definitely with a yuck value of 9, kids will enjoy When Lunch Fights Back: Wickedly Clever Animal Defenses. This kid did!
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WHEN LUNCH FIGHTS BACK: WICKEDLY CLEVER ANIMA DEFENSES. Text copyright © 2015 by Rebecca L. Johnson. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Millbrook Press, an imprint of the Lerner Publishing Group, Minneapolis, MN.
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Purchase When Lunch Fights Back at Amazon—B&N—Book Depository—Lerner Books.
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Learn more about When Lunch Fights Back HERE.
Meet the author, Rebecca L Johnson, at her website:  http://www.rebeccajohnsonbooks.com/
Find more MG Nonfiction at the Lerner Publishing Group website:  https://www.lernerbooks.com/

Millbrook Press is an imprint of Lerner Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews

This is one of those books filled with so much fascinating yet disgusting information that you can’t help but read parts out loud to other people so they can be grossed out right along with you.

Or maybe that’s just me. Because I started reading this book at work one day and just had to read some sections aloud to my co-workers. Like when Rebecca L. Johnson explains how a certain fungus grows inside the corpse of a type of carpenter ant, until “a long, skinny stalk erupts through the dead ant’s head.” Or the description of a wasp laying an egg on a cockroach, then the egg becoming a larva that slowly eats the roach’s internal organs while the roach is still alive. (And then I absolutely had to show my co-workers the accompanying pictures, as well. I mean, just look at page 24.)

Maybe you think zombies aren’t real, but zombification of sorts actually exists in nature. In Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature’s Undead, Johnson explains how parasites like hairworms and the jewel wasp, among others, reproduce by infecting their host and making them act in weird, practically zombie-like ways. Vacant stares and stilted movements? Check. Unresponsive to pain, injury, even loss of body parts? Check.

Johnson (whose Journey Into the Deep I reviewed several years ago) focuses on just a few parasites in this short but, uh, engrossing book. Her writing is vivid, the design and photo selection effectively complements the text, and a lot of information is packed into this short book. Besides describing how the parasite infects its host and reproduces, Johnson also briefly discusses the scientific observations and experiments that informed our knowledge of the parasites. Back matter includes an author’s note, glossary, and bibliography. Whether you’re interested in science or just want to read a good gross-out book, or both, I highly recommend Zombie Makers.

Book details:
Middle Grade nonfiction
Published in 2012
ISBN 9780761386339

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.

Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature’s Undead
By Rebecca L. Johnson
Millbrook Press (an imprint of Lerner)
$30.60
ISBN: 978-0761386339
Ages 9 and up
On shelves now

There’s this podcast I like to listen to called RadioLab, which is essentially just a show for people who like kooky science but are still a little foggy on what exactly Einstein’s Theory of Relativity actually means or why the sun is hot. Science for the English majors, let’s call it. Often the show will come up with really original stories, like the guy who purposefully gave himself tapeworms to cure his asthma (it worked). That story came from a show about parasites and it was accompanied by these strange unnerving stories about insects and viruses and worms that could turn their hosts into . . . well . . . zombies, basically. And though I am a children’s librarian, the thought never occurred to me that these stories could, combined with others of the same ilk, create the world’s most awesome work of nonfiction. Fortunately for all of us, Rebecca L. Johnson has not my shortsightedness. In Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature’s Undead you will meet a whole range of horrifying creatures. It is, without a doubt, probably the grossest book for kids I’ve ever read. And boy howdy let me tell you I have read a LOT Of gross books in my day.

What do you think of when you think of zombies? Do you think of lurching undead ready to feast on your braaaaaains? Or do you think of something a little more insidious like the REASON those zombies don’t seem to have a lot of will of their own? As it happens, zombies are real. Not in the corpse-walker sense, necessarily, but in nature there are plenty of creatures willing to make others into their mindless slaves. Meet the hairworm Paragordius Triscuspidatus, which can convince a perfectly healthy cricket to drown itself. Or Toxoplasma Gondii which, aside from being the reason you’re not supposed to let pregnant women near cat poop, turns rats into suicidal kitty lovers. Page by page author Rebecca Johnson presents us with examples of evolution gone amuck. Zombie makers exist, it’s true, and as their hosts we’d better learn as much as we can about them before they get to us next!

Zombies actually get a lot of play in children’s literature these days. Insofar as I can tell there are two ways to play them. They can’t be romantic like vampires or other members of the monster family so they must either be funny or horrifying. Funny is the route that I’d say 85% of kids’ books about zombies go. Whether you’re talking about Zombiekins or The Zombie Chasers or Undead Ed or any of the other books out there, funny is usually the way to go. I say that, but a lot of what kids want when they enter a library is to be scared. And if you can scare them with real stuff, and maybe even gross them out a little, you are gold, my friend. That’s why this book works as well as it does.

Johnson cleverly sets up the book so that readers can compare and contrast what they know about zombies, zombie talking points let’s say, with these zombie-esque diseases, parasites, and insects. I’d never really thought about Old Yeller as a zombie story, but that’s what it is, isn’t it? A beloved member of the family is bitten by something evil and suddenly the boy who loves it most must put it down before something worse happens. That’s a zombie plot, but it’s Johnson who makes you realize that rabies is just another form of zombie fun. By couching her nonfiction tale within popular zombie fiction tropes, she has an easy in with the child readership.

The writing is superb in and of itself, no doubt, but I wonder if interest in this book would be quite so high if it were not for the accompanying disquieting photographs. The book as an object is beautifully designed from start to finish, which only helps to highlight the photographs found inside.  What I really liked about the photos was that they had two different ways of freaking the average reader out. On the one hand you have the photos that go for the immediate ARGGGG! reaction. I am thinking specifically of the worm. The worm that infects human beings. That makes them want to plunge themselves into the water where it breaks out of the skin and leaves the body. Alien much? The image of someone slowly and painfully removing the worm without water is enough to make you lose your lunch. But even better are the photos that elicit a slow dawning sense of horror. The fungus O. unilateralis is a clever beastie, and its greatest trick is in forcing ants to clamp onto leafs and die (but only where the temperature is just right). There’s a shot of a dead ant with a long horrible reproductive stalk emerging out of its head, spreading its spores to other innocent ants. It’s a quiet photo and lacks the urgency and pain of the leg worm shot, but it’s worse somehow. It has this brooding malice to it. You actually do not want to touch the page in the book for fear of somehow touching the fungus. That’s how effective it is.

Children’s librarians often try to lure kids into reading nonfiction by doing what we call booktalks. If you’re a good booktalker you can get your audience to fight over even the dullest looking book. Some books, however, sell themselves. Hold up this book and there’s not a child alive who won’t be instantly fascinated. Describe even one of the stories inside and you might have at last found the book they want even more than the latest edition of Guinness World Records. Informative even as it makes you want to go hide in a clean, sanitized hole somewhere, Johnson has created a clever little book that is bound to keep adult and child readers who find it, enthralled. Ick. Bleach. Awesome.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley borrowed from fellow librarian for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Scary by Joaquin Ramon Herrera

• Phineas Gage: A Gruesome But True Story of Brain Science by John Fleischman

• Killer Ants by Nicholas Nirgiotis

Oceans cover about 70% of the earth’s surface, yet only about 5% of the ocean has been seen by humans. In fact, we actually know less about the ocean than we do about some parts of our solar system.

In 2000, Census of Marine Life launched. Over the course of ten years, 2,700 scientists from around the world participated in 540 different expeditions that surveyed many different areas of the ocean. The goal of the Census was to “assess the diversity (how many different kinds), distribution (where they live), and abundance (how many) of marine life.” Although the exploration phase of the Census is complete, it will take many more years to sort through and study everything that was collected.

Journey into the Deep: Discovering New Ocean Creatures by Rebecca L. Johnson introduces readers to the Census and some of the creatures the Census discovered. The book is divided into sections based on the area of the ocean being studied, beginning with shallowest regions surveyed to the deepest.

Johnson joined scientists on a range of expeditions and effectively conveys the experience of, for example, sampling the ocean’s shallow edges or sorting through mud gathered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, picking out the animals. She describes each oceanic environment and some of the methods scientists used to survey the area by writing in the second person, putting readers in the scientists’ shoes, as in this paragraph after a submersible carrying scientists descended to the ocean’s deep slopes:

Farther down the continental slope, bubbles start fizzing past the porthole. For one terrifying moment, you’re sure the submersible is leaking air. The scientist calmly explains that you’ve arrived at a cold seep, a place where gases are bubbling up from the seabed. The gases are methane and hydrogen sulfide. If you could smell the water outside the submersible, it would stink like rotten eggs. (p. 24)

As engaging as Johnson’s writing, however, the book’s real draw are the numerous photographs of remarkable creatures on every page. There’s the brightly colored squat lobster (p. 11); the barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma, p. 18), which has a transparent head (I need to repeat this—it has a transparent head!); the hairy-legged yeti crab (Kiwa hirsuta, p. 50; and a sea cucumber (Enypniastes eximia, p. 55) that sheds it skin when attacked, to name just a few.

There are some nice design touches, as well. Sidebars, which I usually dislike, are used effectively here, in large part because of the page layout. Paragraphs are never split on to two pages, but contained in their entirety on a single page. Also, each of the sections for the eight different oceanic environments Johnson observes begins with an inset depicting both the depth of the ocean and where, geographically, the expedition took place.

Backmatter includes a glossary, source notes, a selected bibliography, index, and a “Learn More” section that includes books, websites, and DVDs. Journey into the Deep is a great resource for middle schoolers, but readers of all ages will be drawn to photographs.

Including the new creatures discovered as part of the Census, only about 250,000 marine species have been identified. Since there could be more than 10 million ocean species we haven’t found yet, there’s still a lot more exploration to be done.

Book source: public library.

Cross-posted at 0 Comments on Journey into the Deep by Rebecca L. Johnson as of 1/1/1900