Drew Harvell
How are Salish Sea Stars Faring in our Ocean’s Menagerie?
EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
The Ocean's Menagerie: How Earth's Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life
Elliott Bay Book Company
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Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms that rival human cities, jellyfish that glow in the dark, and sea stars with super strength: ocean invertebrates are among the oldest and most diverse organisms on earth, In The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life, leading marine ecologist Dr. Drew Harvell passionately explores how these spineless creatures have turned 600 million years of adaptation into a stockpile of evolutionary “superpowers” to thrive in aquatic landscapes around the world.
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Bending the “rules” of land-based biology, marine invertebrates have developed highly specialized skills to help them with everything from energy consumption and nutrition to defense against predation and disease. The Ocean’s Menagerie introduces readers to numerous players in these deep-sea evolutionary skill games: corals stronger than steel or concrete; highly intelligent octopuses navigating their surroundings with sophistication; sponges that create their own disease-protecting chemicals; and keystone species of sea stars that tend to the balance of their coastline habitats like experienced gardeners. Harvell’s team recently uncovered the cause of sea star wasting in a discovery of the decade, and she reflects on the science to get to that revelation and what it means for the future of our local stars.
Dr. Harvell acts as an experienced ambassador and enthusiastic tour guide — diving into examples from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, St. Croix to Indonesia, and beyond — bringing attention to the global changes rapidly affecting this wonder-filled, ancient ecosystem.
Drew Harvell is professor emerita of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, affiliate faculty at the University of Washington and a former science envoy to the U.S. State Department. She is the author of Ocean Outbreak and A Sea of Glass, which were, respectively, the winner of the Sustainability Science Award and the winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, among others. She has written for The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Hill, and CNN, and she has authored over 180 academic articles in Science, Nature, Science Advances, and more. Dr. Harvell was featured in the award-winning film Fragile Legacy, narrated by Ted Danson about the Blaschka Glass Invertebrates museum collection. She is currently a science adviser for Fabian Cousteau’s underwater space station, PROTEUS™.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle.