About this item
There is a growing crisis in our oceans as rates of infectious disease outbreaks are on the rise. Marine epidemics have the potential to cause a mass die-off of wildlife from the bottom to the top of the food chain, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Fueled by sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic in warming seas, ocean outbreaks are sentinels of impending global environmental disaster. Ocean Outbreak follows renowned scientist Drew Harvell and her colleagues as they investigate how four iconic marine animals - corals, abalone, salmon, and starfish - have been devastated by disease. Based on over twenty years of research, this firsthand account of the sometimes creeping, sometimes exploding impact of disease on our ocean's biodiversity ends with a hopeful message.
About the Author
Drew Harvell is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University and Curator of the Blaschka Marine Invertebrate Collection. Her research on the sustainability of marine ecosystems has taken her from the reefs of Mexico, Indonesia, and Hawaii to the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest. She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, a winner of the Society of American Naturalists Jasper Loftus-Hills Award, and a lead author of the oceans chapter in the recent U.S. Climate Change Assessment. Her writing appears in The New York Times, The Hill and as co-editor of The Ecology and Evolution of Inducible Defenses and in over 140 academic articles in journals such as Science, Nature, and Ecology. Visit the Fragile Legacy Blaschka Website at http://fragilelegacy.info and her research website at http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/harvell/Welcome.html. Photo by David O Brown.
