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

by Drew Harvell (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Drew Harvell is Professor Emerita of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, Affiliate Faculty at University of Washington and a Science Envoy to the US State Department. 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, the Prose Award, and the Sustainable Science Award, among others. She has written for The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Hill, and CNN, and she has authored over 180 academic articles in Science, Nature, Science Advances, and more. Dr. Harvell featured in the award-winning film Fragile Legacy, narrated by Ted Danson about the Blaschka Glass Invertebrates museum collection. She is currently a science adviser on various ocean conservation boards, including Fabien Cousteau's Proteus Ocean Group, working to build the Underwater Space Station.