Allen Young

Enjoyable book about ecology, tying everything (multiple types of insects, reptiles, monkeys, plants, fungi) together to chocolate. My daughter also enjoyed the punning asides of the two "bookworms" at the bottom of the page.

One point: I noticed that the ants were drawn with four body segments -- specifically, two thoraxes. I pointed this out to my partner (a developmental biologist) who then explained to our 6yo that these were not normal ants; that they have a homeotic mutation. Yet another useful lesson from this book (albeit an unintentional one).… (meer)

This is a great book that illustrates the way things in nature are connected and depend on each other. The book starts out with yummy chocolate. But you can't have chocolate without....cocoa beans, without... cocoa pods, without...midges, and it goes on like this until it gets to monkeys. Monkeys eat the goo inside the cocoa pods and help spread the seeds around for more trees to grow. Pods do not fall on their own, so the trees need animals to help spread their seeds around. At the end of the book, the author tells us that cocoa growers generally grow cocoa trees in tree farms with our other trees to cover up some of the harsh sun. These trees only produce pods from about 5% of the cocoa flowers. But when the cocoa trees grow in thinned out rain forests with shade, midges, lizards and coffin-fly maggots they grow more pods.
The book also gets into how flowers pollinate, leaves use the sun to create food, roots soak up water and nutrients from the soil.
I think this book is important because we humans often times do not understand how nature depends on nature to survive. If we understood this better, we might recognize the things we are doingt that destroy a single component in an ecosystem harm the entire planet and in turn, us.… (meer)