Gary Meek, Georgia Tech Photo

The following first appeared in The New York Times, August 10, 2009.

Not long ago, I got stung by a yellow jacket, and after the usual ow-plus-obscenities moment, I found myself thinking about pain, happiness, and Justin O. Schmidt. He’s an Arizona entomologist and co-author of the standard text in the insect sting field, “Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators.” But he’s more widely celebrated as the creator of the “Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index,” a connoisseur’s guide to just how bad the ouch is, on a scale of one (“a tiny spark”) to four (“absolutely debilitating”).

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Conniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

In Botswana, I stayed at a camp where a biologist studied African wild dogs. The location was perfect, sheltered within a stand of trees looking out onto the Okavango Delta floodplains. There was a big tent, fenced in on two sides with bamboo, for the kitchen and dining area. The shower, supplied by a black barrel on a platform, stood in the open on the edge of camp. A previous guest had been showering there one time during a drought when he heard a slurping sound from the other side of the bamboo screen.

Photo by James Conniff

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Conniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

We were out on a lake in northern Louisiana where the tupelo gums and bald cypresses grew close together, and the water around the trunks mirrored each tree perfectly, so our boat seemed to be suspended in middle space, a forest underfoot as well as overhead. We were hauling a hoop net to the surface, and the alligator snapping turtle inside didn’t like it. He clamped his jaw on the gunwale as if to shred the aluminum. Then the tattered remains of the baitfish swung into range. The turtle’s mouth closed on the skull, and the hollow sound of bone caving in echoed around the boat.

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Conniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

It was an ordinary morning on a dusty island in the vast, flooded Okavango Delta. A troop of baboons, and the naturalists who study them, had been wandering all morning, everyone alert for the ordinary African hazards of Cape buffalo, elephants, and lions. We carried no weapons, so avoidance was our only defense.

Photo by Ben Conniff

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Conniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

Fortunately, I didn’t yet know Schmidt the time I spent a week with a BBC film crew trying to observe a big, metallic blue pepsis wasp sting a tarantula. In these wasps, the macabre reproductive strategy is for the female to hunt down a tarantula, inject a paralyzing venom into its abdomen, and then bury the spider with a single egg deposited on its back.

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Conniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

One time in a rain forest in Panama, a big, handsome solitary ant came climbing down a tree trunk. A local told me it was called the bullet ant and suggested that I pick it up for a closer look. Something about his smile caused me to decline.

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Conniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

Later, Schleser and I went down to Peru to swim with piranhas and collect fish in the wild. One day, our nets produced a slithery, eel-like little catfish with no pectoral fins or dorsal spines. Schleser identified it as the notorious candiru, which typically swims into the gills of other fish, latches on, and pierces a gill artery to feed on the blood.

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Conniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

One morning in my mid-life crisis, when I had considered and rejected the thrill-seeking possibilities of nude skydiving or drag-racing on a mountain road in a red Corvette convertible, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to go for a swim in a tankful of hungry piranhas at feeding time.

A red-throated loon. Photo by John Kennedy

The following first appeared in The New York Times, May 27, 2009.

When I’m heading off on assignment as a wildlife writer, to study spider webs in Costa Rica, or chase lemurs in Madagascar, people often say, “You’re going where? You’re going to do what?” Doubtfully, they add, “And somebody’s actually paying you for this?” Then they ask if they can come along. Secretly, my neighbors suspect that I am a hit man.

Richard Conniff got blasé about watching animals like cheetahs, because all they did was sit around in the sun grooming themselves.
The following is from "'Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time,' by Richard Conniff," a Q&A by Dave Holahan that first appeared April 12, 2009, in The Courant.

Richard Conniff began his writing career in 1969 modestly enough, as a teenager penning obituaries for a small New Jersey newspaper. Later, after college and gainfully unemployed, he pitched a story about the New Jersey "state bird," the salt marsh mosquito, to a local magazine.

It was published, and the rest, as they say, is natural history.