The Ocean's Menagerie How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life

About this book

From a world-renowned marine scientist, The Ocean's Menagerie is a transporting exploration of how the strangest and most remarkable creatures on our planet are informing cutting-edge science.

Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms the size and shape of cities, and jellyfish that glow in the dark: ocean invertebrates are among the oldest and most diverse organisms on earth, seeming to bend the rules of land-based biology. Although sometimes unseen in the deep, the spineless creatures contain 600 million years of adaptation to problems of disease, energy consumption, nutrition, and defence.

In The Ocean's Menagerie, marine ecologist Drew Harvell takes us diving from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, from the Caribbean to Indonesia, to uncover the incredible underwater 'superpowers' of spineless creatures: we meet corals many times stronger than steel or concrete, sponges who create potent chemical compounds to fight off disease, and sea stars who garden the coastlines, keeping all the other nearby species in perfect balance. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering, and energy innovations of these wonderous creatures hold ever more important secrets to our own survival.

The Ocean's Menagerie is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman's passionate connection to an adventurous career in science, and a call to arms to protect the world's most ancient ecosystems.

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Biography

Drew Harvell is Professor Emerita of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. She is the author of Ocean Outbreak and A Sea of Glass which were, variously, the winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, recipient of the Rachel Carson Environmental Literature Award, one of the year's best 'Art Meets Science' books by Smithsonian Magazine, Prose Award winner in Biological Sciences from the Association of American Publishers, and recipient of the Ecological Society of America Sustainability Science Award.

She has written for the New York Times, Seattle Times, The Hill, and CNN, and her work has been featured in the Atlantic, Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Nature, and more. She also featured in the award-winning film, Fragile Legacy, and is currently a science adviser for Fabian Cousteau's Underwater Space Station.