How to Clean a Hippopotamus: A Look at Unusual Animal Partnerships

Product Description
What does a water buffalo see in an egret? Why would a badger want a coyote for company? What makes a horse mackerel think he can hang around with a Portugese man-of-war---and live to tell about it? In this fascinating picture book, Steve Jenkins and Robin Page explore these and many other instances of mutualism: the mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships that can be found everywhere in the animal kingdom.

But in addition to the husband and wife team's trademark style of cut paper illustrations and fascinating text, they will also cover new artistic ground. Drawing upon the style of the graphic novel, they will use a series of illustrative frames from different points of view to illuminate just why that water buffalo and egret need each other, exactly how that badger and coyote work together, and the unbelievable manner in which the horse mackeral and man-of-war lend each other a helping hand. Quid pro quo has never look quite like this!

Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Steve Jenkins and Robin Page, Authors of How to Clean a Hippopotamus

Dear Amazon Reader,

Robin and I keep a file of animal facts and images that have caught our attention for one reason or another. At some point we realized that we'd accumulated a lot of information about animal symbiosis, and we thought it would be fun to do a book on the subject. We decided to focus on mutualism, a symbiotic relationship in which all the participants benefit. Quite a few children's books have been written about symbiosis. Once we started really researching the subject, however, we found a lot of fascinating relationships that we'd never come across in a children's book.

Most of our books about animals have the same basic structure: a portrait and a paragraph or two of explanatory text. In these books a single image represents one moment in time in the life of an animal. But many symbiotic relationships are characterized by a kind of tit-for-tat, back and forth interaction. This suggested a different approach to the subject--one that could show a series of moments in time. We thought that a graphic-novel format would be an interesting way to deal with sequences of images. We also hoped that this approach might appeal to some of those slightly older readers who've left picture books behind and moved on to chapter books.

As authors and illustrators, our favorite symbiotic relationship might be the cooperative hunting behavior of the coyote and badger (unfortunately, it often turns out badly for the prairie dogs they hunt). As participants, the human/dog relationship is definitely our favorite.

- Steve Jenkins and Robin Page

(Photo © Tim Tucker)