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Susan McCarthy is co-author with Marjorie Ingall of Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies. Ingall & McCarthy write Sorrywatch.com, a website which analyzes apologies. McCarthy also writes about wildlife and animal behavior. She’s co-author of the international bestseller When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, and author of Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild. Not literally raised by wolves, McCarthy lives in San Francisco.

Category: Aquaria

  • That fish can read you like a book

    My sister had a fire eel (Mastacembelus erythrotaenia), Thomas, living in an aquarium near the refrigerator in which his food was kept. The food was tasty live tubifex worms. Thomas spent most of his time lurking under and behind rocks. Some predators like Thomas find this a useful default activity, since you might be thinking…

  • Where do codfish get their food? Where does the town of Nahant get its revenue?

    When I was a child in Massachusetts, my mother and her best friend used to visit the tidepools at Nahant. They kept salt-water aquariums at a time when no one did that, and they peopled these artificial tidepools with native creatures they collected. Usually they took their children with them, which included me and my…

  • When You Come Between a Woman and Her Rock

    I was shocked to hear that one of the two alligators at the Academy of Sciences had bitten the other alligator so badly that he would lose a toe. Actually, I wasn't shocked. No one was shocked. Alligators are bitey. And it even looks as if Claude, the wounded party, will get to keep the…