The Ocean's Menagerie
How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Nature Best Book of 2025 • A Wall Street Journal Holiday Gift Pick
An elegantly written exploration of the cutting edge science of the strangest and most remarkable creatures on our planet by a leading marine biologist
Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms that rival human 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 defense.
In The Ocean’s Menagerie, world-renowned marine ecologist Dr. Drew Harvell takes us diving from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, from St. Croix 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 that garden the coastlines, keeping all the other nearby species in balance. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering, and energy innovations of these wonderous creatures inspire ever more important solutions 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvell (Ocean Outbreak), an ecology professor emeritus at Cornell University, serves up an entrancing examination of marine invertebrates' many peculiarities. She describes, for instance, how the coral skeleton has evolved to act "like a hall of mirrors" directing sunlight toward the tiny photosynthetic algae that live within coral and generate energy for its host. Sea slugs known as nudibranchs upended prevailing scientific wisdom that "cells and tissues were not shared between different species," she writes, discussing how they incorporate into their own defensive systems the "vicious stinging cells called nematocysts" that they absorb from the anemones they prey on. Exploring scientific efforts to harness aquatic creatures' adaptations for humanity's benefit, Harvell describes how pharmaceutical companies are working to incorporate the cancer-slowing chemicals produced by sea sponges into drug treatments, and how doctors hope coral-derived materials might one day be used as a substitute for human bone in reconstructive surgeries. Throughout, Harvell emphasizes invertebrates' outsize influence on their ecosystems, describing how giant clams filter pathogenic bacteria from water and how coral provide protection from waves and erosion for the crustaceans, fish, and other creatures that live on reefs. Buoyed by fascinating trivia and lay reader–friendly science, this should be a no-brainer for nature lovers.
