Bitch by Lucy Cooke review – a joyous debunking of gender stereotypes in nature

From lemurs to spiders, this gleeful exploration of female sexuality in the animal world overturns a host of outdated assumptions

In the annals of female animals and their sexual antics, few can match the ferocity of the British fen raft spider, a rare wetland arachnid with a legspan the width of a human hand and an appetite for insects and tadpoles. During courtship, a male will caress a female by vibrating his legs across her body. Then – wham – the female will often grab him, kill him and gorge on her dead mate’s corpse. But in that instant before death, the male may insert his sperm-transferring pedipalp into the female, fertilising hundreds of her eggs even as he is being eaten.

“So his life, although short, achieved its purpose. What’s more, sucking dry her lover’s body may well have nourished the female’s eggs, giving her spiderlings a better chance in life,” writes Lucy Cooke in Bitch, her bold and gripping takedown of the sexist mythology baked into biology.