Book Review

Nature’s Sexual Spectrum

By J. L. Davis

2024, CSIRO Publishing, Clayton

pp. 128

Price A$29.99, ISBN 978-14-86318-92-6

Josh Davis is currently the Digital News Editor at Natural History Museum, London. Over the past decade he has been working as a science journalist and writer, where he has developed a particular interest in what he calls ‘queer’ natural history. He has experience in research and fieldwork in central Africa and South America. With regard to science writing he has had articles published in The Guardian, The Observer and The Times.

This book presents unusual examples of reproduction and reproductive behaviour in a number of varied species. It explores the reproductive behaviour and deterministic pathways that he terms queer. He attempts to emphasise atypical reproduction so as to ‘present animal behaviour that challenges us to rethink our assumptions and prejudices’ (CSIRO Publishing 2024). The book follows a typical layout: introduction, contents, chapters, followed by index, further reading, references and picture credits. Each of the 29 chapters discusses a specific animal, plant (angiosperms and gymnosperm) or fungi. Within the animals it covers mammals, reptiles, birds, invertebrates, a dinosaur and a toad. Each chapter overviews the organism before delving into its reproductive biology. Each chapter has one or two full colour photographs of the organism making this something of a coffee table book. The audience being addressed is a general one, although an academic audience may be drawn to it for light reading, but only rarely as a reference source.

The greatest strength of this book is in presenting a wide range of organisms (see above). Its greatest weakness is in using colloquial language to explain complex and diverse biological behaviour. The author strays too far from clear and articulate science preferring to use the word queer, which immediately adds his own subjectivity at the expense of objective scientific explanation. For example, in the second paragraph of his introduction he states ‘… most species of animal probably exhibit some form of queer behaviour, and being a purely heterosexual species is the exception.’ My objection here is not the quantitative part of this statement, it is the use of the term queer. Queer means strange or odd. When applied colloquially for the single species of Homo sapiens it means a broad group of sexual behaviours and identities. Yet the statement and the book deals with a wide variety of species with highly specific and evolved reproductive pathways. I suggest articulating how (in what way) species or individuals deviate from the mean sexual behaviour of their species or higher taxa; I suggest this would be a more useful and accurate approach. Using the word queer as it is applied to humans to explain reproduction (sexual or otherwise), in a range of other organisms, is unhelpful, it is anthropomorphising, which I think is distracting for the readers and devalues the book. Otherwise the book introduces each species in question and outlines their methods of reproduction quite well.

The layout of the book using chapters to discuss specific organisms lends itself to making the book a coffee-table publication – all quick reads with vivid colour pictures of the organisms in question, all on thick glossy pages. However, the text will bring those with a narrow view of reproduction into a wider world. A world that many graduate students will already be aware of. Yet the book’s wide set of examples will be more than most undergraduates typically experience. From an educational viewpoint the varieties of reproduction discussed throughout this book will remind students that nature is complex and varied. Thus, the book does extend, just a little, from what undergraduates are taught on the subject.

Clearly a lot of research has gone into this book, yet it is written without inserting citations or indicating what notes go with what comment. This limits me from calling this a reference book. However, there are useful references in the reference section, but you will have to dig them out by reading them carefully. Even so, they are not clearly linked to the text by citations. For example, a reference given on the unpublished notes of Dr George Murray Levick includes a long URL and until I checked it against my records of his published work I did not realise that it is published in a well-known journal, the journal Polar Record (i.e. Russell et al. 2012). I suggest in text citations and conventionally formatted references would make the reference section easier to handle.

The supplementary material is of high quality for a very generalist reader. A picture of a common bottlenose dolphin in picturesque turquoise waters may attract some readers, but it is not scientifically helpful. I would have preferred to see many more line diagrams depicting the reproduction pathway that the text attempts to explain.

On the whole this is a valuable coffee table book. Best if it is put where undergraduates might find it and in libraries of high schools. I expect I would pick it up to help myself get started if writing on reproductive pathways of any of the biota within its pages.