The Ancient Menagerie How the Ocean's Spineless Creatures Hold Secrets to Our Survival

About this book

Hidden beneath the waves, far from our familiar gardens and forests, the oceans of the world remain a realm of mystery. This unseen frontier is the cradle of life on our planet, home to creatures that originated over 600 million years ago and filled with a stunning array of spineless creatures: the invertebrates.

As some of the oldest and most diverse organisms on earth, ocean invertebrates bend and break our rules of land-based biology. The Ancient Menagerie takes readers from the coral castles and underwater battles on reefs in St. Croix and Indonesia to the sparkling jellyfish light-shows off the coast of Hawaii to encounter underwater life in action. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering, and energy innovations of these wondrous creatures hold ever more important secrets to our survival.

This is at once a tale of biological marvels, the story of the author's passion for a 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.