WHEN LUNCH FIGHTS BACK

Here’s blood in your eye.

Along with the ever popular hagfish (aka “snot eel”) and the horned lizard—which can indeed squirt blood from one or both eyes—Johnson (Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature’s Undead, 2012, etc.) profiles 10 animals with particularly noxious defense mechanisms. Likewise introducing researchers who have helped to provide “the science behind the story,” she explains the nature of each defense and, in simple but specific language, the biology that makes it work. Large color photos feature a mix of portrait views and close-ups of relevant body parts, to which spatters of blood and dripping ichor on each page add melodramatic visual motifs. This is an outstanding way for readers to meet scientists at work in both field and lab, as well as to learn that, for instance, fulmar chicks can project vomit up to 6 feet and, creepily, that a school of the Amazonian two-spot astyanax will attack and eject one of its own to distract an approaching predator.

Thrilling reading for budding biologists.