When animals eat other animals, kids savor the gore

Yuckkkk! Eyeewww! Half-delight and half-disgust, these are the sounds young voices make when children confront something grandly gross: photographs of animals eating other animals. Yowwww! Young readers relish this stuff. And publishers seem ever eager to dish up more. Sandra Markle’s three series for Lerner Publishing Group, “Animal Prey,” “Animal Predators,” and “Animal Scavengers,” provide fine reading and tangy, titillating information for little fans of big bites.

In Octopuses (2007), Markle describes the amazing powers of disguise these marine dwellers possess. Octopuses often hide in plain sight. See if your booktalk listeners can find the octopus on page 17, as she blends in with the sea floor. Look at the giant Pacific octopus on page 19. With six tentacles hidden in a hole and two more spread out, she resembles a poisonous snake. Some octopuses change their coloring; others squirt ink to evade predators. A few of them can even snap off their tentacles and grow new ones! Yuck!

From the ocean floor to the world’s northernmost regions, Musk Oxen (2006) are short, shaggy buffalo look-alikes that must keep a constant eye out for predators. Especially white arctic wolves. Show your booktalk audience the picture on page seven, and you’ll hear students’ appreciative “ahhhhs” as they gaze at wolves chasing musk oxen. Mealtime, after all, is just around the corner. Yet these fearsome wolves are not always successful. Big musk oxen can be mighty fighters. Still, more often than not, they’re a mighty tasty dinner.

In Army Ants (2005), and Hyenas (2005), we are introduced to the scavenger class, those creatures that eat dead animals in order to survive. Army ants thrive in the tropical areas of Africa, South and Central America, and Asia. These ants not only eat dead animals; they kill sick, weak, and old animals and eat them, too. What’s more, these tiny insects work as a deadly team—they even look like an army! Check out the photos on pages 12 and 15 of army ants. You have to marvel as they make a bridge with their bodies so cohorts can walk across.

Brown African hyenas, meanwhile, eat animals already dead—and consume any part of the corpse. They also wait for larger predators to make a kill, then feast on the gruesome leftovers. Hyenas’ teeth and jaws are powerful enough to crush bones; look at the photo on page three of one munching on a giraffe. Yet hyenas have family values: The females and their young live in groups, and older members act as babysitters—a good thing in case a mother is killed and becomes food herself.

Back at sea, Great White Sharks (2004) are the Terminators of the animal kingdom—pure killing machines. Markle describes a female Great White Shark, swimming 20 to 30 feet below the ocean’s surface, hunting for food. Her white belly blends in with the sky so she can elude animals swimming beneath her. Her dark blue-gray back hides her from animals (and people) above looking down. This shark listens carefully for nearby prey. Her amazing sense of smell sniffs out her favorite food—seals.

The Great White prefers to find a seal by itself; seals in groups are more difficult to catch. The shark dazzles us with her ability to leap out of the water, though she weighs as much as a large car. She torpedoes after a seal separated from the group and bites, fast and hard. One of the rules in animal books for kids: Show the bite! The photos in this book follow the Great White’s bloodthirsty chase after the seals. They also highlight her rows of razor teeth.

“Poor seal!” your audience members might say. But remind them that the shark’s prey, the seal, is also the predator of the poor octopus we met in the first book. So goes the food chain. And so go the kids to check out these books from the library, to linger over the toothy pics and the fun facts. Yummmmm!