Ten Million Aliens

A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom

Simon Barnes

• Publisher: Atria Books/Marble Arch Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476730363
• Print ISBN:
  9781501117183
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies

For Discovery Channel enthusiasts, this scientific foray into life on planet earth examines how the world’s creatures--both weird and wonderful--are inextricably linked.

Life on planet earth is not weirder than we imagine. It’s weirder than we are capable of imagining. And we’re all in it together: humans, blue whales, rats, birds of paradise, ridiculous numbers of beetles, molluscs the size of a bus, the sexual gladiators of slugs, bdelloid rotifers who haven’t had sex for millions of years and creatures called water bears: you can boil them, freeze them and fire them off into space without killing them.

We’re all part of the animal kingdom, appearing in what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful." In this breathtakingly audacious book, Simon Barnes has brought us all together, seeking not what separates us but what unites us. He takes us white-water rafting through the entire animal kingdom in a book that brings in deep layers of arcane knowledge, the works of Darwin and James Joyce, Barnes’s own don’t-try-this-at-home adventures in the wild, David Attenborough and Sherlock Holmes. Ten Million Aliens opens your eyes to the real marvels of the planet we live on.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Endlessness: Demodex mites, humans
• Sex and the single slug: Slugs
• 2, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18: Mammals and mammaries
• Champagne Lifestyle: New species
• Allspice, ant-killer: Taxonomy and systematics
• Orang orang: Orang-utan and other primates
• My family and other family: Classification
• Below the drop-off: Coral
• Lemurs and archbishops: Primates
• Spineless: Introduction to invertebrates
• Long-jump gold medal: Bushbaby
• Architects of human culture: Wasps
• The lion, the glitch and the glove compartment: Lion
• Brother sponge: Sponges
• The profile of Winnie-the-Pooh: Bears
• Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish: Glass sponge
• Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo: Hyena
• Sod the rainforest: More coral
• The half-and-halfers: Seals
• Walking plants: Sea anemones
• Wimbledon champion: Bovids
• Infernal agony of gelatinous zooplankton: Jellyfish
• Walking with lechwe: Lechwe and genenuk
• Life in the round: Starfish
• Do I know you?: Naked mole rat
• Flatworm, flatworm, burning bright: Flatworm
• The elephant in the corridor: Elephant
• The holiness of tapeworms: Tapeworm
• Plan A for aardvark: Aardvark
• Unkillable bears: Tardigrades
• Flying flashers: Idiurus
• Cans and cans of worms: Nematodes
• Self-sharpening chisels: Rodents
• Tipping the velvet worm: Velvet worm
• Dirty rats: Rat
• Another can of worms: Annelid worms
• Good old Ratty: Water-vole and dormouse
• Trio for piano, bassoon and earthworm: Earthworm
• Night-leaper: Spring-hare
• The daughters of Doris: Ribbon worms
• Flashin’ sunshine children: Shrews
• Becaue I am many: Bryozoans
• That breathtaking breath: Whales
• Getting silly: Lampshells
• Song of the sea: Whalesong
• Dirty beasts: Penis worms
• Gnomes of the river: River dolphins
• Us alone: Placazoans
• Disgustingly upside down: Bats
• Lacing Venus’s girdle: Comb jellies
• The altruistic vampire: Vampire bats
• Here be mud dragons: Mud dragons
• Pocket dynamo: Marsupials
• The Hamlet worm: Nematomorphs
• Death comes for the Elephant’s Child: More elephants
• Who needs oxygen?: Loricifera
• Epiphany: Even more elephants
• A bit samey: Arrow worms
• Time for transition: Platypus
• The peanut trick: Peanut worms
• Feather: Kestrel
• No sex please, we’re bdelloids: Rotifers
• The nausea of Charles Darwin: Peacock
• Evolution in reverse?: Thorny-headed worms
• How many ways of catching a fish?: Toucan, river birds
• ****!: Hairy-backs
• Look, no stabilisers: Bateleur
• The crypto-bums: Goblet worms
• Same bat time, same bat hawk: Bat hawk
• Lobsterisimus bumakissimus: Symbions
• The dark side: Owls
• Is-ness: Jaw worms
• Crisis relocation: Terns
• The Quaker worm: Xenoturbellids
• Swift scramming frenzy: Swifts
• Gutless, brainless: Acoelomorphs
• Jewels that breathe: Hummingbirds
• Just one more thing: Phoronids
• The wardrobe bird: Flamingos
• James Bond and the kraken: Giant squid
• Instant birder: Lilac-breasted roller
• Superslug: Octopus
• The Clever Club: Crows
• Nautilus but nice: Nautilus
• Bell-beat of their wings: Swans
• She sells seashells: Shell-wearing molluscs
• 22:1: Albatross
• Fearful the death of the diver must be: Giant clam
• No flying, please, we’re birds: Flightless birds
• Valuing oysters: Oysters
• Do I contradict myself?: Penguins
• One more twist: Gastropods
• Hijoputido: Passerines
• Creeping like snail: Giant African land snail
• Wild thing: Marsh warbler
• On our last legs: Arthropods
• Blood-chilling: Crocodiles
• A suit of armour: Japanese spider crab
• Snakes, unclad humans and a garden: Snakes
• Beloved barnacles: Barnacles
• Secret snakes: Adder
• The silk route: Spiders
• Disgusting clumsy lizards: Lizards
• The Kalahari Ferrari: Solifugids
• Good luck, little metaphor: Turtles
• Twenty centimetres!: Centipedes
• Shape-shifters: Amphibians
• Second innings: Large blue butterfly
• When I was a rain god: Frogs
• Laser epiphany: Blue morpho
• Death by frog: Golden poison frog
• Les demoiselles du Waveney: Dragonflies
• A miraculous draught of newts: Newts
• Cannibal sex: Praying mantis
• Beautiful shirts: Caecilians
• Unreal city: Termites
• “Fish”: Fish
• True bugs suck: Bugs
• The stillness of salmon: Salmon
• Let copulation thrive: Flies
• The Eden fish: Cleaner fish
• Prostitutes and clients: Bees
• That’s no parasite: that’s my husband: Anglerfish
• The wasp and the devil’s chaplain: Wasps
• The sinking fish: Sharks
• The best butter: Butterflies and moths
• No bones about it: Cartilaginous fish
• Inordinate fondness and all that: Beetles
• Ray of Sunshine: Manta ray
• Axis of weevil: Weevils
• The beginning: Jawless fish, lobe-finned fish
• Acknowledgements
• About Simon Barnes
• Index
• Copyright