TRIALS OF LIFE: A Natural History of Animal Behaviour

Life on Earth traced the development of animals? life from its beginnings some three thousand million years ago, and Living Planet concentrated on how plants and animals interact. In this final book in the trilogy, The Trials of Life sees Sir David Attenborough exploring the ways animals use their bodies and the way they behave. Behaviour is one of the most exciting aspects of natural history, full of action and drama - a killer whale surging up a beach to grab a young sea-lion, an ant navigating across a Saharan sand dune by taking repeated observations of the Sun, a mother bat fighting through crowds of begging infants on the roof of a cave in order to give her milk to her own baby and no other. Living creatures are ultimately driven to pass on their genes to the next generation and this is the prime objective of their existence. In achieving this they must face a whole succession of problems which are fundamentally the same whether the animals are spiders or squirrels, mice or monkeys, llamas or lobsters. The book takes the 12 key stages of life - arriving, growing up, finding food, hunting and escaping, finding the way, home-making, living together, fighting, friends and rivals, talking to strangers, courting, continuing the line - and looks at how the solutions are developed by different species in a huge variety of astounding ways. And this is without even considering the complexities of copulation as rivals are fought and a mate selected. It's all here, birth, sex and death. Superb colour photos throughout plus line art, 282 pages in a fully updated and reissued 2022 edition of the 1990 original text.