“Drew Harvell’s latest book is a true marvel, tracing her journey through science and her fascination with the “amazing invertebrates” that exhibit adaptations “more fantastic than the superpowers of the Marvel Comics heroes.” Professor Emerita of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, Harvell is the author of two other successful books, A Sea of Glass and Ocean Outbreak, as well as more than 180 academic publications. Her PhD thesis focused on the bryozoan Membraniporathat shape-shifts into a spiny box in order to protect itself from its sea slug predator. This “superpower” started Harvell on a journey of discovery about other marine creatures with superpowers. The preface provides an introduction into Harvell’s life, the structure of the book, and why she has focused on invertebrates throughout her career…” Read full review here.
-George I. Matsumoto, Senior Education and Research Specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
“A love letter to the ocean, and its weird and wonderful creatures, from an eminent explorer and marine biologist. Each page is full of wonder and surprise, and in every tale of a shape-shifting octopus or luminous jellyfish, we are reminded why the ocean is worth conserving.”
-Steve Brusatte, New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
“Creatures without backbones are more than 99 percent of our planet’s animal species. Ocean invertebrates have billions of years of experience living, changing and proliferating into an astonishing array of shapes, sizes, and ways of living. They’re more diversely weirder—and more mysterious—than big, bony, familiar animals. Drew Harvell has explored, thought deeply about, seen deeply into, and actually lived in the ocean. The ocean’s life is woven into her own. She is deeply in love with her amazing subjects. And a few pages into this warm and wondrous book, you will be too.”
-Carl Safina, New York Times bestselling author of Beyond Words
“Dr. Drew brings us a magnificent stable of marine critters, so beautiful as to be almost art, so astonishing in their lifestyles as to be almost superheroes. She delivers smooth prose like the incoming tide, building a depth of feeling and flow of discoveries to let us see, underneath every wave and in every sea, how thrillingly complex and stunningly lovely ocean wildlife can be.”
-Stephen Palumbi, PhD, author of The Extreme Life of the Sea