About this item
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.
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.
