GoKawiilHidden Creatures: Luscious Leeches, Bashful Botflies, and the Wondrous, History-Shaping World of Parasites Dino Martins Knopf (2026)
Togetherness: How Symbiosis Can Change the Way We Understand Our World, Ourselves and Our Future Rowan Hooper Fern (2026)
Humans often fancy that we are independent creatures, living sealed off from other species. Yet, that false sense of separation vanishes when bacteria make us sick or a bear raids the rubbish bin. Whether we like it or not, we are interconnected with the living world. Two books explore the ties that bind all living things.
In Togetherness, biologist and science journalist Rowan Hooper proposes that interspecies cooperation is the key driver of life’s evolutionary journey. Hidden Creatures, by entomologist and evolutionary biologist Dino Martins, takes a darker view. Life lives off life, the author explains. “Half of all living things are mooching off others!”
Nature’s villains
Take parasites, which, Martins notes, have afflicted humans since the beginning of recorded history. Inscribed in ancient Canaanite on an ivory comb are the words: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” It is the oldest known sentence written using an alphabet. Lice continue to prey on humans nearly 4,000 years later — as do countless other parasites.
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Martins invites us to take a second look at these oft-villainized creatures that are, nevertheless, integral to life. Many today who profess to ‘love nature’ tend to edit out the less savoury and less inspiring parts. But that is misguided, the author says. You must “seek to understand all of nature”, he insists, or “you will end up loving and understanding none of it”.
His book is not for the squeamish. Martins introduces us to caterpillars that are eaten alive by squirming wasp pupae. He devotes a chapter to a rogues’ gallery of worms; one species (Stephanurus dentatus) lives in the urinary tract of pigs, another (Rhabditis orbitalis) in the eyes of mice and voles, and even more species live in the lungs of birds.
Others dwell in the human body. Today, one-third of the human population is infected with nematode worms, often with grisly consequences. Hookworms, once called the “vampires of the south” owing to their prevalence in the southern United States, live for years in the intestine, sapping millions of their strength and vitality.
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