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Together: Nature’s Amazing Partnerships
Nobody lives alone. From the thousands of bacteria that live in our gut, helping us digest our food, to the network of partnerships that make up our vast planetary ecosystem, living things have been coevolving -- developing together -- since the first organisms appeared on Earth some 3.6 to 3.8 billion years ago. Coevolution--back and forth interactions among living things--is at the core nature of life.
At every level, in every environment, life depends on getting along, cooperating with your neighbors, in many cases, helping each other survive. In the history of life, cooperation has been more important than competition.
We humans could not survive without the network of living things--plants, animals, fungi, and microbes--that support our body systems and create the air we breathe and the food we eat. Just by being alive, we are partners with somebody, whether we like it or not.
Science writer Mary Batten explores the amazing, sometimes bizarre, unlikely partnerships that got life on Earth started and those that are essential to all life today.
At every level, in every environment, life depends on getting along, cooperating with your neighbors, in many cases, helping each other survive. In the history of life, cooperation has been more important than competition.
We humans could not survive without the network of living things--plants, animals, fungi, and microbes--that support our body systems and create the air we breathe and the food we eat. Just by being alive, we are partners with somebody, whether we like it or not.
Science writer Mary Batten explores the amazing, sometimes bizarre, unlikely partnerships that got life on Earth started and those that are essential to all life today.
82 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 8, 2024
About the author
Mary Batten
38 books7 followersMary Batten is an award-winning writer for television, film and publishing. Her many writing projects have taken her into tropical rainforests, astronomical observatories, scientific laboratories, and medical research centers.
She is the author of many books for children. The most recent are Life in Hot Water: Wildlife at the Bottom of the Ocean (Peachtree 2021), NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12; Life in A Frozen World: Wildlife of Antarctica (Peachtree 2020) and Spit: What's Cool About Drool (Firefly 2019). Other books include: Baby Orca (Penguin Random House 2016); Rattler (Penguin Random House 2016); Please Don't Wake the Animals: A Book about Sleep (Peachtree 2008); Who Has A Belly Button (Peachtree 2004); Aliens from Earth ((Peachtree 2003) – 2006 Isaak Walton Conservation Book of the Year Award; Selected by New York City Public Schools in support of 4th grade science requirement for the study of ecosystems (Revised & updated edition Peachtree 2016); Hey, Daddy! Animal Fathers and Their Babies – Named Outstanding Science Read Aloud 2003 by the National Association for the Advancement of Science (Peachtree 2002); Wild Cats (Penguin Random House 2002); Anthropologist: Scientist of the People -- Named Outstanding Science Trade Book for Children by the National Science Teachers Association and the Children's Book Council (Houghton Mifflin 2001); Hungry Plants (Penguin Random House 2000); The Winking, Blinking Sea -- Named one of the Best Children's Books for 2001 (Millbrook Press, 2000); Extinct! Creatures of the Past (Golden Books, 2000); Baby Wolf (Grosset and Dunlap, 1998); Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates, (Tarcher/Putnam, 1994; reprinted with new introduction by iUniverse 2008); Nature's Tricksters (Sierra Club Books/Little Brown, 1992), Discovery By Chance (Funk and Wagnalls) and The Tropical Forest: Ants, Ants, Animals and Plants (T.Y. Crowell). She has appeared on OPRAH. TOM SNYDER and various other television shows and done many radio interviews.
Her magazine articles are published in a variety of publications, including the online journal Pie & Chai, and print ppublications Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Modern Maturity, Shape, International Wildlife, National Geographic World, ZooNooz, Science Digest, Calypso Log, and Dolphin Log.
Mary Batten was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the Children's Television Workshop's science series 3-2-1-CONTACT, and she has written some 50 nature documentaries for television series, including the syndicated WILD WILD WORLD OF ANIMALS (Time-Life Films) and others for National Geographic and Disney Educational Films.
Her magazine article for Science Digest, "Sexual Choice: The Female's Newly Discovered Role," won The Newswomen's Club of New York's Front Page Award for best feature story.
She was editor of The Cousteau Society's award-winning membership magazine, Calypso Log, for six years.
She was married to the late composer Ed Bland. They have two children.
She is the author of many books for children. The most recent are Life in Hot Water: Wildlife at the Bottom of the Ocean (Peachtree 2021), NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12; Life in A Frozen World: Wildlife of Antarctica (Peachtree 2020) and Spit: What's Cool About Drool (Firefly 2019). Other books include: Baby Orca (Penguin Random House 2016); Rattler (Penguin Random House 2016); Please Don't Wake the Animals: A Book about Sleep (Peachtree 2008); Who Has A Belly Button (Peachtree 2004); Aliens from Earth ((Peachtree 2003) – 2006 Isaak Walton Conservation Book of the Year Award; Selected by New York City Public Schools in support of 4th grade science requirement for the study of ecosystems (Revised & updated edition Peachtree 2016); Hey, Daddy! Animal Fathers and Their Babies – Named Outstanding Science Read Aloud 2003 by the National Association for the Advancement of Science (Peachtree 2002); Wild Cats (Penguin Random House 2002); Anthropologist: Scientist of the People -- Named Outstanding Science Trade Book for Children by the National Science Teachers Association and the Children's Book Council (Houghton Mifflin 2001); Hungry Plants (Penguin Random House 2000); The Winking, Blinking Sea -- Named one of the Best Children's Books for 2001 (Millbrook Press, 2000); Extinct! Creatures of the Past (Golden Books, 2000); Baby Wolf (Grosset and Dunlap, 1998); Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates, (Tarcher/Putnam, 1994; reprinted with new introduction by iUniverse 2008); Nature's Tricksters (Sierra Club Books/Little Brown, 1992), Discovery By Chance (Funk and Wagnalls) and The Tropical Forest: Ants, Ants, Animals and Plants (T.Y. Crowell). She has appeared on OPRAH. TOM SNYDER and various other television shows and done many radio interviews.
Her magazine articles are published in a variety of publications, including the online journal Pie & Chai, and print ppublications Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Modern Maturity, Shape, International Wildlife, National Geographic World, ZooNooz, Science Digest, Calypso Log, and Dolphin Log.
Mary Batten was nominated for an Emmy for her work on the Children's Television Workshop's science series 3-2-1-CONTACT, and she has written some 50 nature documentaries for television series, including the syndicated WILD WILD WORLD OF ANIMALS (Time-Life Films) and others for National Geographic and Disney Educational Films.
Her magazine article for Science Digest, "Sexual Choice: The Female's Newly Discovered Role," won The Newswomen's Club of New York's Front Page Award for best feature story.
She was editor of The Cousteau Society's award-winning membership magazine, Calypso Log, for six years.
She was married to the late composer Ed Bland. They have two children.
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June 26, 2025
Together: Nature’s Amazing Partnerships, by Mary Batten, shows kids ten and up how mutually beneficial relationships help wild critters survive, from bees and orchids to hermit crabs and tiny sea anemones. There are many more mutually beneficial relationships than we realize in nature, because as Batten says, “In the history of life, cooperation has been more important than competition.” And she has the facts to show that.
Your favorite kids will find out how tiny mealybugs use ants like cowboys riding horses to whisk them away from danger – and why ants are willing to do that. The life-saving service that acacia trees get in return for feeding and housing ants. Why animals couldn’t exist until bacteria covered the earth with green slime. And how herder ants bribe tiny insects to feed them.
Why do huge grouper fish let tiny fish nibble their scales, eyes, fins, and gills? What do mites offer to ants in exchange for sucking their blood? Why do tropical forest birds protect their babies from parasites – by allowing other parasites into their nests? How do an alga, a fungus, and a yeast live together so effectively most people think they’re a single organism? How do caterpillars actually yell out loud for help from the ants that protect them from wasps – if they don’t have vocal cords? And why coral polyps must have algae living inside them to survive.
Sometimes insects and animals get cooperation willingly, sometimes deception is needed. Your kids will find out how a strange kind of orchid tricks wasps into pollinating it – by getting them to sting its flowers. Another orchid species gets pollinated by tricking male bees and wasps into trying to mate with its flowers. And the sly tricks several plants use when their nectar isn’t enough to lure a pollinator.
In the process, Batten reveals enchanting facts like why monarch butterfly caterpillars deliberately eat poisonous plants. The powerful and nasty way slave-taking ants in Northeastern USA conquer their subjects – without force or fighting. What came before flowers evolved. You can still see examples growing on certain types of trees. How larger primitive bacteria evolved by swallowing – but not digesting – smaller bacteria. Four potent types of poisons plants make to stop predators from eating them. Amazing ways langur monkeys and spotted deer warn each other about predators approaching. And ants that have naturally air conditioned nests 12 feet underground.
All this helps kids figure out “this grand dance of life,” how environmental systems work and why, for example, if a certain type of insect dies off, a particular type of tree will die out, too. I wish there had been books like this when I was a kid!
Your favorite kids will find out how tiny mealybugs use ants like cowboys riding horses to whisk them away from danger – and why ants are willing to do that. The life-saving service that acacia trees get in return for feeding and housing ants. Why animals couldn’t exist until bacteria covered the earth with green slime. And how herder ants bribe tiny insects to feed them.
Why do huge grouper fish let tiny fish nibble their scales, eyes, fins, and gills? What do mites offer to ants in exchange for sucking their blood? Why do tropical forest birds protect their babies from parasites – by allowing other parasites into their nests? How do an alga, a fungus, and a yeast live together so effectively most people think they’re a single organism? How do caterpillars actually yell out loud for help from the ants that protect them from wasps – if they don’t have vocal cords? And why coral polyps must have algae living inside them to survive.
Sometimes insects and animals get cooperation willingly, sometimes deception is needed. Your kids will find out how a strange kind of orchid tricks wasps into pollinating it – by getting them to sting its flowers. Another orchid species gets pollinated by tricking male bees and wasps into trying to mate with its flowers. And the sly tricks several plants use when their nectar isn’t enough to lure a pollinator.
In the process, Batten reveals enchanting facts like why monarch butterfly caterpillars deliberately eat poisonous plants. The powerful and nasty way slave-taking ants in Northeastern USA conquer their subjects – without force or fighting. What came before flowers evolved. You can still see examples growing on certain types of trees. How larger primitive bacteria evolved by swallowing – but not digesting – smaller bacteria. Four potent types of poisons plants make to stop predators from eating them. Amazing ways langur monkeys and spotted deer warn each other about predators approaching. And ants that have naturally air conditioned nests 12 feet underground.
All this helps kids figure out “this grand dance of life,” how environmental systems work and why, for example, if a certain type of insect dies off, a particular type of tree will die out, too. I wish there had been books like this when I was a kid!
Displaying 1 of 1 review