Animal Celebrities
Animal Celebrities
Octopuses are smart animals. They love to solve problems and figure things out. In 2010, an octopus named Paul, who lived in an aquarium in Germany, amazed the sports world. His keepers wanted to see if he could pick the winners in the wildly popular World Cup soccer competition. So they put flags of the competing countries on food boxes and placed them inside his tank. Whichever box Paul opened first would be his pick to win the next soccer game.
Could a sea creature really see into the future? Somehow, Paul predicted the winner in all seven of Germany’s games, plus the final between Spain and the Netherlands! He became an unlikely star of the World Cup. Fans waited eagerly for Paul to choose their team- and joked that they would cook and eat him when he did not!
The six-volume “Astonishing Animals” series examines the physical and behavioral adaptations of a variety of animals which help them to survive. Each title is comprised of 13 chapters as well as a table of contents, a glossary, an index and a brief list of books and websites for further investigation. Animals featured in the series are representative of all of the major groups and range from the microscopic tardigrade to the seven-metre-long beaked whale. Some of the animals will be familiar to readers while others are quite rare and unique. Besides the main body of the text, there are Fact File boxes which, with the exception of the title about animal celebrities, tell where the animal is found, its habitat, size and diet. (In the case of Animal Celebrities, the Fact File box states the animal’s date of birth and death, where it lived, and its “hobbies”.) As well, smaller “Wow!” text boxes provide interesting trivia, some examples being that a 270-kg octopus can squeeze through a 2.5 cm opening and that chimpanzees’ nests contain lower levels of bacteria than human beds. An attractive layout and abundant, eye-catching colour photographs add to the series’ visual appeal.
Readers will especially enjoy Animal Celebrities. A few of the animals warrant an entry by virtue of their contributions to science: Laika, the space dog, Dolly, the cloned sheep, and Grecia, the toucan (she sported the first prosthetic beak), for example. Others are included in this title due to their amazing skills or tricks: Chaser, a border collie who could identify over 1,000 toys, and Paul, the octopus, whose uncanny ability to predict the winner of World Cup soccer games made him a hero. And some animals became famous just because of their appearance: Grumpy Cat, for instance, whose frowning face had over eight million Facebook followers. A knighted Norwegian penguin, a polar bear cub raised by zookeepers, a feline stationmaster, a wonder pig, a groundhog, and a 187-year-old tortoise round out the mix.
Enjoyable and engaging, with just enough information to pique the reader’s interest, the “Astonishing Animals” series does a good job of introducing readers to some incredible animals.
Gail Hamilton is a former teacher-librarian in Winnipeg, Manitoba.