September 2025 | Oceanography
93
THE OCEAN’S MENAGERIE
HOW EARTH’S STRANGEST CREATURES RESHAPE THE RULES OF LIFE
Book by Drew Harvell, 2025, Viking, 288 pp., ISBN: 9780593654286
Reviewed by George I. Matsumoto
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 Membranipora that 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.
The author’s first book, A Sea of Glass, published in 2016,
is about the glass masterpieces created by Leopold and Rudolf
Blaschka that have been used by countless students to learn about
biology and the complexity of life. It also describes Harvell’s jour-
ney to match real animals to the glass models. While researching
A Sea of Glass and her second book, Ocean Outbreak, on marine
infectious diseases affecting corals, abalone, salmon, and starfish,
Harvell came to realize that she had another story to tell—that of
her scientific journey as she discovered the plethora of invertebrate
adaptations that have enhanced their survival.
The Ocean’s Menagerie consists of eight chapters, each depicting
a stage in Harvell’s career and featuring an organism whose super-
powers captured her attention. Beautiful illustrations by Andrea
Dingeldein enhance Harvell’s stories.
The first chapter focuses on the sponge—an animal that has
the potential to completely revolutionize the biomedical field and
whose cells are totipotent (a special type of cell that can evolve into
any type of cell). The chapters continue moving up through the
animal phylogeny, ending with the sea star and its unusual skin
that can change stiffness to help it pull open its mollusk prey. In
this chapter, Harvell mentions the ochre sea star, which seems
to have better immunity than most sea stars to the wasting syn-
drome first identified in 2013 and that ravaged Pacific Northwest
sea star populations.
My favorite chapter features the gelata (gelatinous zooplank-
ton), better known as jellyfish. Starting with an overview of black-
water diving (scuba diving over deep water at night) used to study
them, and linking her observations with the remarkable Blaschka
glass collection featured in her first book, Harvell gives a broad
overview of the jellies and then focuses on their ability to create
their own light—bioluminescence. As part of this superpower,
some jellies use a green fluorescent protein that is now a power-
ful tool for scientific and medical work. (This discovery led to the
2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Osamu Shimomura, Martin
Chalfie, and Roger Tsien.) The chapter also includes an introduc-
tion to the colonial siphonophores and to the ctenophores, a phy-
lum different from all other animals, as they lack DNA sequences
that all other invertebrate phyla have and that exhibit a unique ner-
vous system. Research in the last decade suggests that ctenophores
are only distantly related to cnidarians (the other jellies with sting-
ing cells) and may be a sister group to all other animals.
Don’t miss the final chapter—an epilogue to a life in an ocean
that is warming and becoming more acidic. It asks: What will life
look like in our ocean of the future? Who will be the winners and
who the losers in the largest habitat on Earth? And it includes dis-
cussions of climate change, bleaching coral reefs, resilience, over-
fishing, marine protected areas, environmental DNA, CRISPR, and
more. Even in this final chapter, which could very much have been
a depressing way to end a book, Harvell engages the reader with a
well thought out overview of the challenges facing the ocean today,
what we might be able to do to help alleviate some of the stress
on it, and, most importantly, why we must protect our ocean—the
source “of our most fundamental new discoveries.”
The full color plates in the middle of the book were a wonder-
ful surprise, and the detailed citations/references at the end will
provide a bounty of additional reading for those who are curious
enough to delve further. This book is an easy and entertaining read,
with stories that you’ll remember and hopefully share with others.
REVIEWER
George I. Matsumoto (mage@mbari.org), Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute,
Moss Landing, CA, USA.
ARTICLE DOI
https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2025.e305
BOOK REVIEW