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

Drew Harvell’s team has worked for over a decade on the mysterious disease killing seastars and will update on where we go now that the team has identified the killer in our waters. She will also talk about local examples from her new book, such as jellyfish that glow in the dark, sea stars with super strength and nudibranchs that steal defenses. In The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life , Harvell 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. Drew Harvell is professor emerita of Ecology at Cornell University, Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington and a former NOAA Aquanaut. 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.