Interview :: Becky Crew – ‘Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals’

October 29th 2012

Books and science; two things that never get old. Their combination, however, might have a few of you cringing amongst memories of bunsen burners and long response exam questions on photosynthesis. ‘Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish & Other Weird Animals’ will also make you cringe, but it’s a good cringe. Imagine the love child of ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’ and the Discovery Channel. The Flog’s Madeleine Clarke chatted with author, Becky Crew about writing, weirdness and wangs.

FBi: Having a blog background with Running Ponies, was writing a full-length novel a tricky process?

Becky Crew: It was tricky, but luckily I’d decided with my editor that I was going to split the book up into short stories of fifty animals, and those animals would be separated into chapters according to their ‘weirdness’. For example, were they weird because of their sex lives, their body parts or their defense mechanisms? I think this is the kind of book that you can read like a novel, but also pick up and put down and read like a bunch of short articles if that suits you better.

Do you see yourself as popularising science? Is the whole idea of ‘making science cool’ important in this day and age?

It’s extremely important to be continuously thinking about how we can communicate science in a way that reaches everyone, and not just keep it within the circle that lives and breathes science because they studied it in high school, university, etc. We don’t need to convince people that science is cool – it’s discovering how the world works. It’s sort of beyond cool, but we need to convince people that science isn’t intimidating and ‘too hard’, which is what popularising science is all about. I’ve worked really hard to try and keep my writing fun and approachable, but it’s also important to reward your readers by making them feel like they’ve learnt something important. Good, popular science writing should make readers feel smart by helping them understand something complex and unfamiliar, and I hope people who read my book can come away feeling like that!

Why the weird? What attracts you to the whacked-up in nature?

Bizarre things in nature are amazing because they’re often weirder than any of the shit we make up, and I love that this can blow the minds of kids, science nerds, lay people and David Attenborough alike. I love how unifying the discovery of a snake that looks just like a penis is. I blog regularly about new species of animals that are being discovered and only in the last few months have scientists discovered a penis snake, a new species of monkey that has an incredibly bright blue butt and genitals, and a marine worm that looks like Yoda. Who knows what’s going to be announced tomorrow or next week? I adore that about nature. In Zombie Tits, you’ll find real-life fairy tales, like rats that give up chocolate to help free their rat friends from cages, and real-life nightmares, like the parasitic isopod that devours a fish’s tongue and grips onto the stump as a way of getting a constant supply of food. It’s just so awesome that this stuff actually exists.

Is the research and writing as wild a process as the final product?

Yep, while I’d set out with a rough list of the animals I wanted to include in the beginning, I’d be constantly looking for weirder animals to trump the ones I already had. The book’s a real journey of discovery for me, which is something that hopefully readers will experience too as they make their way through it.

Do you sympathise with any of your featured creatures? Any affectionate attachments?

I couldn’t help but fall in love with the pigbutt worm, otherwise known as ‘the flying buttocks’. This deep-sea marine worm is about the size of an acorn and its middle segment has been flattened, allowing its two outer segments to swell up like a pair of balloons, or two perfectly rounded buttocks. And right there in the middle is a little puckered mouth surrounded in mucus, which the scientist who discovered it in 2007 thinks it uses to catch tiny pieces of food. It belongs to the Chaetopteridae family, and all species in this family live exclusively in tubes on the sea floor as adults, catching food as it floats past. But not the pigbutt worm – it floats through the ocean, free as a bird, and no one’s quite sure why it is so different from all of its relatives. There’s something so charming about this little pigbutt worm making a place for itself in the ocean like no one else.

Now be honest, was ‘Zombie Tits’ always going to be a part of the title or did it dawn on you at some glorious point in writing?

I can’t take credit for the title, unfortunately! One of my editors suggested it very early on, and made the joke that teenage boys will likely appreciate it, so I thought, why not? It came from one of the stories in the book about a population of birds in Hungary called great tits that during a particularly lean winter a couple of years ago, took to eating the brains of tiny bats that were just coming out of hibernation. These clever birds would listen for the calls the bats make as they wake up, knowing they’d be too groggy and disorientated to fight back as they were torn out of their cave to have their skulls pecked open.

The lesser water boatman (Micronecta scholtzi) has the loudest penis on Earth… what’s Becky Crew’s party trick?

Haha, well unlike the lesser water boatman, I can be pretty quiet, but I can talk about Skyrim for like five hours straight, and I’m pretty good at identifying obscure dog breeds.

What comes next?

No idea! I just hope I can keep writing about weird animal discoveries forever, and I especially hope I’m around when scientists start putting a dent in that ‘90% of the ocean is unexplored’ statistic. Because the pigbutt worm might be weird, but it’s nothing compared to whatever’s lurking undiscovered in the shadows of the deep sea.

What: A book named ‘Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals’

Who: Becky Crew – Award-winning, Sydney-based science writer and blogger.

When: The book has already launched! Go grab a copy, pronto.

OK, but where: It’s available in all good bookstores and online.

Contributor

Read more from FBi Radio