Christie Wilcox writes the Science Sushi blog for Discover. Her bylines include The Washington Post, Popular Science, and Slate. At five years old, she told her teacher she liked to “open the mouths of dead geckos to look at their tongues”—an obsession with animals that has only deepened. Her first book, Venomous, recounts her close encounters with nature’s most notorious, including the lionfish she studied for her PhD.