Böcker av Drew Harvell

Hidden beneath the waves, far from our familiar gardens and forests, the oceans of the world remain a realm of mystery. This unseen frontier is the cradle of life on our planet, home to creatures that originated over 600 million years ago and filled with a stunning array of spineless creatures: the invertebrates. As some of the oldest and most diverse organisms on earth, ocean invertebrates bend and break our rules of land-based biology. The Ancient Menagerie takes readers from the coral castles and underwater battles on reefs in St. Croix and Indonesia to the sparkling jellyfish light-shows off the coast of Hawaii to encounter underwater life in action. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering, and energy innovations of these wondrous creatures hold ever more important secrets to our survival. This is at once a tale of biological marvels, the story of the author's passion for a career in science, and a call to arms to protect the world's most ancient ecosystems.

The author makes an eloquent plea for marine biodiversity conservation.Library JournalHarvell seems to channel the devotion that motivated the Blaschkas.The GuardianWinner of the 2016 National Outdoor Book Award, Environment Category It started with a glass octopus. Dusty, broken, and all but forgotten, it caught Drew Harvell's eye. Fashioned in intricate detail by the father-son glassmaking team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the octopus belonged to a menagerie of unusual marine creatures that had been packed away for decades in a storage unit. More than 150 years earlier, the Blaschkas had been captivated by marine invertebrates and spun their likenesses into glass, documenting the life of oceans untouched by climate change and human impacts. Inspired by the Blaschkas' uncanny replicas, Harvell set out in search of their living counterparts. In A Sea of Glass, she recounts this journey of a lifetime, taking readers along as she dives beneath the oceans surface to a rarely seen world, revealing the surprising and unusual biology of some of the most ancient animals on the tree of life. On the way, we glimpse a century of change in our ocean ecosystems and learn which of the living matches for the Blaschkas' creations are, indeed, as fragile as glass. Drew Harvell and the Blaschka menagerie are the subjects of the documentary Fragile Legacy, which won the Best Short Film award at the 2015 Blue Ocean Film Festival & Conservation Summit. Learn more about the film and check out the trailer here.