Poking the Squid

For too long, science has ignored and obscured the multiplicity of animal sexual behaviour. With vivid, often funny and always beautiful watercolour illustrations in a work of graphic nonfiction, artist Perrin Roosevelt Ireland examines how animals express and have sex. With the help of her cats Ursula and Pudge, she takes us on a wild biodiversity ride from queerness, infidelity and divorce to consent, sexual cannibalism and sex change. Ireland interviews researchers at the edge of this new science and brings readers along as she learns the latest discoveries. 

In vivid comics of seahorse dads, polygamous albatross, and gender-fluid barnacles, Poking the Squid illustrates for us a vibrant and erotic earth that we are just beginning to grasp. 

By illuminating and celebrating animal diversity, Poking the Squid asks us to embrace our own.