Marlene Zuk has a way with words. She’s funny, engaging, and thought-provoking. All of those qualities come through in her sixth popular science title — Outsider Animals: How the Creatures at the Margins of Our Lives Have the Most to Teach Us. In her latest book, the esteemed scientist turns her focus on animals at the fringes of our lives and, often, our consciousness in a way other animals are not. Think raccoons, snakes, rats — animals that live alongside us and are very often here because of us. A behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist, Zuk skillfully shines a light on how we shape them and they shape us. She argues for a new way of thinking about our relationship to them. She shared her thoughts on the brilliance of cockroaches, whether animals can be good or bad, and what we miss when we anthropomorphize.
Q. Where did the idea for this book come from?
A. The seeds for this book were planted years ago during a series of casual exchanges with Jim Gorman, a long-time science writer for The New York Times. He had a knack for finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, but it was a specific piece he wrote about gulls that really stuck with me. Most people see gulls as beach-dwelling nuisances or "sky rats." But in Jim’s hands, they became creatures of wonder. I reached out to him to tell him how much I loved the piece — how I loved the way he took an animal people find annoying and revealed its brilliance.
We started talking about all the other animals like that. The ones that live on the fringes, the ones that aren't exactly "invited" to the party, but show up anyway. One of us — I can’t quite remember who — coined the term: the outsider animals. The idea of a book was born right then. The project drifted into the "someday" pile, but the idea stayed with me. It was too much fun, and frankly, too important to leave unwritten.
Q: In the book, you talk about a variety of animals — cowbirds, raccoons, cockroaches. After doing the research for this book, which animal could you write a whole book about on its own and why?
A: The first very easy answer to that is all of them because, pretty much as I was writing all of the chapters, invariably I would go through this phase where I would think, "Oh my God, this is the most amazing animal ever. How did I not know that?" It was like having this little love affair with each and every species. My favorite chapter, however, is about cockroaches. I just ended up loving cockroaches so much. They are amazing. They are much more variable than people realize — there are thousands of species, but only a few are pests. Some give birth to live young rather than laying eggs, and several also take care of their babies, which is rare in invertebrates.
Q: You’ve written a number of popular science books before this. How does this book fit with your body of work as a whole?
A: All of my books are, in one way or another, about the way people think about animal behavior and how it reflects their lives. One of my goals in writing almost all of my books is to help people see animals for what they are, and not as replicas of humans. We extol the virtues of particular species because we see them as being like humans in some way. I want to argue instead that they're not like humans, and that's fine. They're like them. If you can go beyond interpreting what animals do, always in the sense of what people do, I think it's much more enriching and you learn more about them.
Q: In the introduction to the book, you talk about not just the impact these animals have on us, but our impact on them, particularly in relation to the conversation around invasive species. You suggest that this book is a middle path between those poles. Can you talk a bit about that?
A: The book raises questions like, are there good species and bad species? And a lot of those so-called bad species are in the places they are because we brought them there. So, you know, who belongs where and when? The question becomes how do you define a native species, and what environments are “natural”?
Hawai’i is a great example. I spent years doing research there, and it’s a place that raises lots of questions about who belongs where. The first Hawaiians hunted some native birds to extinction, and brought a whole suite of new plants with them. And so should they not have done that? It makes you ask questions that I think reveal how blurry the boundaries are. Life — and evolution — are continuous, and it is hard to pick some frozen moment that is "pure" and that we want to restore to.
Q: You talk about anthropomorphism (projecting human traits onto animals) versus anthrodenialism (downplaying similarities between humans and other animals) as these kinds of bookends to how we think about the value of other animals. Can you say more about that?
A: What I'm trying to do is almost the opposite of people who argue that we should love other species more because of how similar they are to humans. I am saying that us loving or respecting or honoring other species shouldn't hinge on how much we think they're like us. I feel like we can stop making humans too special, but that doesn't mean that we have to do that by saying that we're exactly like all these other organisms. Recognizing that they're different in their own ways is a more productive way to think about it.
Dr. Zuk’s new book comes out March 17. She will give author talks April 15 at Open Book in Minneapolis and an event at the Bell Museum in May. Both are free and open to the public.