My favorite nonfiction animal books that make you go holy shit

I'll add mine:

Dr. Seely's Honeybee Democracy, which I read in 2022 (during my first GPT-2 experiences). The book discusses basic bee dances, but then expands much further into Seely's own research discovering how simple rulesets allow for the complexity of the supraorganism (i.e. the hive).

The book ends with comparisons between coordinated workerbees as miniature robots, which definitely helped me realize how important K.I.S.S. is, organizationally (whether in life or LLM, "keep it simple stupid").

[•] <https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...>

I'll add and old tome I used to keep by the toilet as a kid.

"Hens Teeth and Horse's Toes"

Awesome sort of factoid book on the quirky ways different animals evolved

Loved "An immense world" !

The chapters on bats and eels are absolutely crazy.