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We're also excited that this book will showcase 70 of our favorite nerds from around the world, as Nerd Nite has always prided itself on being a launching pad for emerging folks: About 98 percent of our presenters were either grad students or young professionals in their twenties and thirties when they first presented. We always wanted to be a platform for the next generation of experts, not for household names. Though, interestingly, now that we've been around for two decades, there are innumerable instances of our once-fledgling nerds who have gone on to achieve the tremendous success we always knew they would. We've had past presenters become bestsellers, award-winning documentarians, museum curators, doctors, lawyers, all-star podcasters, politicians, and eminent researchers, but we'll forever remember them as enthusiastic, wise, wily weirdos who simply wanted to passionately present in front of a slightly tipsy audience of like-minded folks. We're even responsible for dozens of marriages and dozens of children—yes, we're grooming the next generation of nerds already! Ah, Nerd Nite, the bespectacled face that launched a thousand ships.

But most of all, we want this book to retain and build upon the spirit of our face-to-face events. We want its stories, lessons, jokes, infographics, and illustrations to be as fun, irreverent, challenging, approachable, and smart as the presentations you've grown to love.

So now, somewhere between The World Almanac, MAD Magazine, Science for Dummies, your university's alumni magazine, and probably not the Bible, we proudly bring you How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite. Shout-out to Dr. Sarah Richardson, whose contribution in the Tech (High and Low) chapter inspired our title (along with Dale Carnegie, of course). Cheers!

Excitedly, nervously, and still slightly nauseously yours,

Chris and Matt (two easily influenced fun-guys...get it?!)

CREATURE FEATURES

"People love to learn about weird creatures on Earth." This isn't quite one of Newton's laws, but it might as well be. Yes, we realize the exact phrasing still needs work, but it doesn't change the fact that people love animals. It doesn't matter if your interest is in watching them, petting them, feeding them, drawing them, teasing them, training them, talking to them, eating them, hunting them, or preventing people from eating them or hunting them, curiosity about the natural world abounds. This is true even if you'd rather watch David Attenborough or Wild Kratts on TV than actually set foot in a jungle. In fact, we're flattered that you're even taking a few minutes from watching cat videos on YouTube right now to read this sentence. Who among us can resist a tale of a tiny shrimp as powerful as a .22-caliber bullet, spider sex catapults, spiders of unusual size, or sex-changing fish? Because of this universal adoration of our planet's weird and wonderful fauna, Nerd Nites throughout the land have always featured a heavy dose of weird-ass nature, and this chapter is no different. Also, I'm a biologist and am strongly biased toward this field since it's clearly the best and most important area of research. We at Nerd Nite feature so many organismal (and orgasmical) oddities that we had to disperse some of them throughout the book, but we also wanted to bring a few of them to you right off the bat. Dolphins that work for the US Navy? Check. A primer on cephalopods? Check. So here we go...release the kraken (or perhaps just normally sized squid)!

—Chris

by Forest Ray, PhD

The first camel spider I saw failed to impress me. Don't blame the spider, though—my own expectations were set much too high.

Iraq hadn't yet fallen when my own deployment orders came, but tales of eight-legged behemoths whose jagged mandibles could turn flesh to pudding were already making the rounds, giving us new reasons to "stay alert, stay alive." That first camel spider skittered through the light of my flashlight while I was on guard duty in Kuwait, as we massed to cross the border. The soldier I stood guard with and I followed it with our lights to get a better view. Sure enough, we had encountered our very first camel spider. It was...small.

Camel spiders range in length from roughly two to six inches, with most species closer to the lower end of the range. Those found in the Middle East, however, often grow to between five and six inches in length. Not exactly the stuff of monster movies, but speaking as someone who has been woken up by a tarantula on his chest, I can assure you that terror comes in all sizes.