Giulia Bignami’s ‘Cats know it’ comes out, a story of incredible animal behavior

2023-05-26 17:37:42

Australian octopuses throwing seaweed at each other, spitting archer fish, bees that distinguish Monet’s impressionist brushstrokes from Picasso’s cubist ones, mantises that love cinema and rigorously in 3D. There are these and many other amazing animal stories in “Cats know it” (ed. Giunti), the new book by Giulia Bignami, class of 1990, a PhD in Chemistry at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. An easygoing and ironic pen inspires the pages of the work of the researcher and clinical manager who recounts, and retraces, the scientific results that have emerged on the animal world in recent years in various universities around the world.

With her new work – the first in 2021 was ‘The astronomical raft’ – Giulia Bignami takes us, between fun and science, on an exhilarating journey full of surprises among the most curious ethological experiments, illustrated by the imagination of Laurina Paperina . “It’s not exactly a bestiary” articulates the author while conversing with time.news. “The idea of ​​collecting some of the wonders and oddities that characterize the animal world was born – she explains – from the desire to make known how much there is still to be amazed, and to learn, starting from all that we (yet) do not know about other animals”.

“Without an engaging dissemination component – he also observes – the results of long, perhaps complex and certainly demanding scientific research, carried out by researchers scattered throughout universities around the world, run the risk of remaining closed in a bubble of purely scientific relevance”.

“I set myself a very titanic, perhaps impossible task”

“The task I have set myself is therefore extremely titanic and perhaps impossible – but otherwise what would be the fun? – and it is to transport the reader on an exhilarating but instructive, surprising but scientific journey through which to break this apparently unattainable science bubble to the general public, but above all to shape (consciously, or perhaps not) a new perspective, a new point of view on the world” underlines Giulia Bignami,

The author, who lives and works in Edinburgh as a researcher and clinical manager, explains that her new book “isn’t exactly a bestiary, or rather a rather unusual bestiary”. “The classic subdivision of animals between water, earth and air – he continues – is only partially respected, instead giving more space to a final section entirely dedicated to beauty, art, illusions and magic, aspects of sensitivity and perception that we are used to considering an exclusive of us human animals”.

Furthermore, adds Giulia Bignami, “the illustrations that accompany each chapter do not only perform the (classical) task of presenting each animal to the reader but are born from the imagination of the artist Laurina Paperina with the aim of immediately involving the reader, in direct, immediate and visual way, in the bizarre experiments and in the specific behavioral aspects that I then deepen in the course of the narration”. “In this sense, the complementarity between scientific results and artistic interpretation is of vital importance to ensure clear and at the same time exciting communication” she assures.