The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life

The ocean is where all life began, four billion years ago, but as humans we only ever get to glimpse a fraction of it. Luckily the marine biologist Drew Harvell has donned her scuba gear and met some remarkable marine creatures — and she tells us about their fascinating lives in this book * The Times, *Best Books of 2025 so far* * Thank goodness for marine biologists such as Drew Harvell to take us on undersea safaris ... In The Ocean’s Menagerie she [Harvell] dons her scuba gear so we don’t have to, and recounts a lifetime of experience meeting the remarkable marine creatures that almost nobody else will ever get to see… [An] enchanting book -- Henry Gee * The Times, *Book of the Week* * Harvell … reveal[s] some of the exceptional attributes of … underwater marvels * Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025* * [A] fascinating new book… [Harvell] writes vividly and with tangible delight about this strange world, zooming in on a series of the most striking of these animals * Spectator * In this enchanting book she [Harvell] uses the complex histories of eight underwater creatures to showcase the mind-boggling variety of marine life * Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2025* * A vividly revelatory exploration of a more ancient biological universe, adjacent yet largely invisible to our own and offering countless benefits to humanity’s future -- William Gibson, author of Agency 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, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs The Ocean's Menagerie is a marine smorgasbord of the spineless. Her life's-work, exploring the cracks and crevices of seafloors across the world is the backbone of a story full of overlooked organisms who thrive without one. What she has discovered is magic and bewildering, astonishing creatures that challenge our idea of animalhood and pull off biological tricks that transform our landlubber lives. This will make you look again at the marine lives around you, whether you swim past them or encounter them on the shore. The exquisite and strange inventions marine invertebrates have evolved are as surprising and wonderful as the glass miniatures that unite her journeys. It is the portrait of the deeply human activity of marine biology that I loved most; Harvell not only helps you understand the startling lives of marine invertebrates but does so through an immersion in the lives of the funny, impressive and peculiar people who peer together through the waters of the world -- Tom Mustill, author of How To Speak Whale 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, author of The Extreme Life of the Sea