Looking at creatures, from burrowing beetles to spotted hyenas, The Creatures Guide to Caring explores what it means to be a good parent
The Creatures Guide to Caring
Elizabeth Preston
Vikings, $30
My first few days of breastfeeding a newborn, I felt like I had turned myself into a 24-hour restaurant. A demanding but sweet customer flagged me down with squeals demanding milk 24 hours a day. Unfortunately, I was also on cleaning duty, wiping up spit up and poop butts.
Breastfeeding is hard work. But after reading the book by science journalist Elizabeth Preston The Creatures Guide to CaringI’m glad I’m not a buried beetle.
The creatures use their oral and anal secretions to knead small dead animals into smooth meatballs. The parent beetles then bury the smothered carcasses and lay their eggs nearby. Some species even feed their brood by regurgitating pieces of the carcass, helping young beetles grow to 200 times their original size in just six days. “A newborn growing at this rate would be the size of a beluga whale in less than a week,” Preston writes. Suddenly my own child doesn’t seem so heavy.
The Creatures Guide to Caring was born from Preston’s growing fascination with the biology of parenting after having her first child. “If so many people have done it before you and are doing it right now – if so many animals are doing it with no books, no apps, no tips to follow – why is this the hardest thing you’ve ever done? » she writes. Perhaps by discovering kinship with the animal world, Preston could learn something about his new role as a parent. Each chapter dissects the pros and cons of parenthood, piecing together how it evolved in humans and other creatures.
The book begins with a scene familiar to many human parents: Preston caring for her baby alone in a dark room, feeling like life goes on without her. Well, that’s familiar until Preston regurgitates food into his child’s mouth. She thought she was a wasp. “Sometimes I get mixed up because I still don’t get enough sleep. What can I say? I have kids,” Preston says, deadpan.
Unsavory eating habits aside, Preston explores the evolution of child-rearing with humor and admiration, examining parenting practices across the animal kingdom. The book is an entertaining exploration of all kinds of kin, from single-parent species to village-dependent humans.
Take the second chapter, which examines how the fish fathers became among Earth’s first parents. Although distant from humans, fish have their own versions of the same hormones involved in our own pregnancies and child care. For example, when male threespine sticklebacks care for eggs, the genes that activate the bonding hormone oxytocin. Father fish also produce progesterone and estrogen, which can affect how they respond to predators and care for their offspring.
Humans don’t lay eggs like fish do. Fortunately, we don’t either push babies through pseudopenises like female spotted hyenas TO DO. (Preston stops asking questions after a scientist tells him there were “a lot of tears.”) But like hyena mothers, we are bonded to our children for life and protect them fiercely. Mother spotted hyenas push aside other adults during kills to ensure their young can eat, just as we might push past the buffet line to ensure picky children get the only food they will swallow.
Parenting in the wild also has its dark side. A female long-tailed skink might eat all of her eggs if she encounters predators one too many times, perhaps because trying again is better than continuing to fight. Marmosets and tamarins, species in which mothers rely on others to care for their offspring, are more likely to reject their babies if there isn’t enough help nearby.
Humans, too, are often faced with difficult decisions about children they don’t want or can’t care for. This difficulty exists in part because for us, being a parent is not a two-person job. We became parents alongside a community of relatives and friends who share some of the burden.
I, as well as readers at any stage of child-rearing—whether children are not yet born, have left the nest, or are somewhere in between—can take comfort in the fact that we are not the only species in trouble. Creatures in the animal kingdom have had hundreds of millions of years to come up with almost endless solutions for raising their young, Preston writes. There are many ways to be a good parent.
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