The Ocean's Menagerie

A transporting exploration of the deep sea, and how our planet’s strangest, most ancient and astonishing creatures have urgent relevance to cutting-edge science today.



Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms the size and shape of 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, these incredible spineless creatures contain 600 million years of adaptation to problems of disease, energy consumption, nutrition, and defence.

Marine ecologist Dr Drew Harvell takes us diving from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, from the Caribbean 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 who garden the coastlines, keeping all the other nearby species in perfect balance. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering and energy innovations of these wondrous creatures hold ever more important secrets to our own survival.

The Ocean’s Menagerie is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman’s passionate connection to an adventurous career in science and a call to arms to protect the world’s most ancient ecosystems.

Review

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*

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 ― 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 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


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

Everyone lives on Planet Ocean, but not everyone has a front row seat to see what makes it so wonderful. Drew Harvell is the teacher you want to reveal the intricate mysteries that make up most life in the sea. The Ocean’s Menagerie has unforgettable lessons that mix science, wonder, and a deep love for life beneath the water’s edge -- Nick Pyenson, author of Spying on Whales

In an underwater world of sea pens and comb jellies, where stony lettuce corals do battle with purple gorgonians, Drew Harvell is the perfect guide, companion, and translator. She writes with undiminished wonder about creatures she has spent a lifetime studying, filling The Ocean’s Menagerie with astonishing science and storytelling. A book of marvels -- Thor Hanson, author of Close to Home

About the Author

Drew Harvell is Professor Emerita of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. She is the author of Ocean Outbreak and A Sea of Glass which were, variously, the winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, recipient of the Rachel Carson Environmental Literature Award, one of the year’s best ‘Art Meets Science’ books by Smithsonian Magazine, Prose Award winner in Biological Sciences from the Association of American Publishers, and recipient of the Ecological Society of America Sustainability Science Award.

She has written for the New York Times, Seattle Times, The Hill, and CNN, and her work has been featured in the Atlantic, Guardian, Washington Post, Scientific American, Nature, and more. She also featured in the award-winning film, Fragile Legacy, and is currently a science adviser for Fabian Cousteau’s Underwater Space Station.