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Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex
In delightful watercolor comics of pregnant seahorse dads, spider oral sex, and the four-headed echidna penis, Perrin...
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In delightful watercolor comics of pregnant seahorse dads, spider oral sex, and the four-headed echidna penis, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland takes us on a wild biodiversity ride through queerness, infidelity, consent, divorce, sex change, and even sexual cannibalism in the animal world. Poking the Squid illustrates the splendid diversity of nature's eroticism. For too long, science has prudishly obscured the wildly creative kinkiness of animal sexual behavior. But Poking the Squid celebrates how assumptions about sex are shifting.
Ireland interviews researchers probing the leading edge of animal reproductive biology and, with the help of her cats Ursula and Pudge, brings readers along as she learns the latest discoveries that implode traditional notions of sex roles, relationships, and just who is mounting whom. These researchers are making dolphin vaginal popsicles, retrieving sperm packets from male squid mouths, and documenting dolphin orgies. From the externalized clitoris of the spotted hyena to mating-by-fusion in anglerfish, Poking the Squid draws on decades of feminist and queer theory to show that sexual diversity is biodiversity, and boisterous boinking is only natural.
Ireland reminds us that we humans, from habitat destruction to climate change, impact all of animal life, including their private lives. Yet Earth's sexual ecosystem is filled with joy, resilience, and vitality--a balm to climate grief and a reason to protect all forms of nature's pleasure. And by illuminating and celebrating animal diversity, Poking the Squid invites us to embrace our own.
Author: Perrin Roosevelt Ireland
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 06/16/2026
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.04lbs
Size: 9.28h x 7.33w x 1.16d
ISBN: 9781324089049
Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2026
Publishers Weekly 06/15/2026
About the Author
Ireland, Perrin Roosevelt: - Perrin Roosevelt Ireland is an artist and environmentalist. For a decade, she worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ultimately as deputy to the executive director. Her artwork has been published in Discover, Nature, Scientific American, and The Rumpus. She serves on the board of the Roosevelt Institute, was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the New York Aquarium, and is a Banff Graphic Novel Resident. Perrin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her cats (and muses) Ursula and Pudge.
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