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The Sting of the Wild
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
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Publisher's summary
Entomologist Justin O. Schmidt is on a mission. Some say it's a brave exploration, others shake their heads in disbelief. His goal? To compare the impacts of stinging insects on humans, mainly using himself as the gauge.
In The Sting of the Wild, the colorful Dr. Schmidt takes us on a journey inside the lives of stinging insects, seeing the world through their eyes as well as his own. He explains how and why they attack and reveals the powerful punch they can deliver with a small venom gland and a "sting", the name for the apparatus that delivers the venom. We learn which insects are the worst to encounter and why some are barely worth considering.
The Sting of the Wild includes the complete Schmidt Sting Pain Index. In addition to a numerical ranking of the agony of each of the 83 stings he's sampled so far (from below one to an excruciatingly painful four), Schmidt describes them in prose worthy of a professional wine critic: "Looks deceive. Rich and full-bodied in appearance, but flavorless" and "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel."
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Great book about eggs!!
- By Timothy on 03-24-21
By: Tim Birkhead
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This Is Your Brain on Parasites
- How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society
- By: Kathleen McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.
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Entertaining but questionable studies
- By mdkoci on 01-02-17
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Cannibalism
- By: Bill Schutt
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Eating one's own kind is a completely natural behavior in thousands of species, including humans. Throughout history we have engaged in cannibalism for reasons related to famine, burial rites, and medicine. Cannibalism has also been used as a form of terrorism and as the ultimate expression of filial piety. With unexpected wit and a wealth of knowledge, Bill Schutt takes us on a tour of the field, exploring exciting new avenues of research and investigating questions like why so many fish eat their offspring and some amphibians consume their mothers' skin.
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Ruined it at the end
- By Kimberly Ames on 12-07-17
By: Bill Schutt
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The Beak of the Finch
- A Story of Evolution in Our Time
- By: Jonathan Weiner
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend 20 years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos, studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are 400 at the time of the author's visit or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about 20 generations of finches - continuously.Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.
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Fascinating in-depth look at evolution in action
- By Philip on 05-15-11
By: Jonathan Weiner
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Animal Weapons
- The Evolution of Battle
- By: Douglas J. Emlen
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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As singular and strange as some of the weapons are, we learn that similar factors set their evolution in motion. He looks at everything from our armor and camouflage to the evolution of the rifle and the structures human populations have built across different regions and eras to protect their homes and communities.
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Loved it!
- By Susan on 07-17-15
By: Douglas J. Emlen
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The Thing with Feathers
- The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
- By: Noah Strycker
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, and other mysteries.
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Interesting book, terrible reader
- By MGM123 on 03-16-18
By: Noah Strycker
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Letters to a Young Scientist
- By: Edward O. Wilxon
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career - both his successes and his failures - and his motivations for becoming a biologist.
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Long on biography, short on advice
- By A. Mandelin on 08-02-18
By: Edward O. Wilxon
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Genesis
- The Deep Origin of Societies
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least 17 - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.
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Simply awful
- By Mike A Klotz on 02-07-20
By: Edward O. Wilson
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The Triumph of Seeds
- How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History
- By: Thor Hanson
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.
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Delightfully simplistic!
- By Adrian on 03-30-16
By: Thor Hanson
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The Book of General Ignorance
- By: John Mitchinson, John Lloyd
- Narrated by: uncredited
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Abridged
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Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British best seller. Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more, The Book of General Ignorance is a witty “gotcha” compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.
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Interesting.
- By A. Hawkbird on 12-07-08
By: John Mitchinson, and others
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I bow down to our benevolent worm overlords
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What listeners say about The Sting of the Wild
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JackOnDaRocks
- 03-25-24
A long story for the results
I enjoyed the book for the depth of information. I did feel it was a bit verbose in getting to the results and could have been a bit more captivating with more vibrancy in the performance. Overall a good read.
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Intriguing World of Stinging Insects.
What made the experience of listening to The Sting of the Wild the most enjoyable?
All descriptions informative and fun. The bullet ants, so powerful their venom...they are the most compelling.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The bullet ants.
What does L. J. Ganser bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Absolutely. Just the right enough of informative description and historical, entomological reportage.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
An extreme reaction, well no. Not a fitting question for this mellow paced, informative, entertaining listen. How fun it would be to listen to this book during a long drive with children.
Any additional comments?
A keeper, especially if you are fauna buff.
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- Colin Mc
- 04-13-17
An interesting look at stinging insects
What made the experience of listening to The Sting of the Wild the most enjoyable?
The obvious passion and love the author has really helps this book come across charmingly. Passion is an incredibly important part of teaching people about science, and I appreciate it as someone who is in microbiology but not in entomology. Theres a lot of interesting information and history in here and I found it a fun, breezy walk through the world of stinging insects as well as the evolutionary reasons they engaged in stinging. Its a good, digestible read even for non scientists I would assume and if you're at all interested, give it a go.
Any additional comments?
If I had complaints, I'd say that the book being designed so that you can read independent of chapter order might have had a bit of a negative impact. It leads to some repetition and I think a more ordered and linear book would have benefited it overall. I also might have suggested leaving the appendix about stinging insects as a PDF rather than putting it in the book, as it doesn't have too much meat on its bones and isn't super thrilling to listen to due to the nature of what it is.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Nathan
- 06-04-22
Amazing.
Highly educational without making it boring. Listening to the Pain Index descriptions is highly amusing. One of them compares the pain of a sting to stepping on a Lego in the middle of the night, something many of us can relate to.
Well worth the time and credit/payment.
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- J. Moras
- 02-14-23
Good book!
Big fan of hymenopteran insects. If that’s something that interests you I recommend this book. Despite Schmidt’s claim to fame being getting stung by insects and rating the pain- this book focuses less on that, and more on the need for this defense- and the insects that wield them
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- Jorge Gandara
- 09-07-20
Great info .. to a point
It’s a good book up into .. about a third is evolutionary conjecture.. it’s so hard to find a science book that just talks about science.. not how things MAY have happened...
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1 person found this helpful