When I think of ocean animal life, it’s sharks and whales and dolphins and schools of fish and an occasional sea lion that come to mind — but other than an occasional Kraken I tend to overlook the invertebrate life. And the ocean invertebrates are apparently actually amazing.
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“But the vertebrates are essentially all variations on the same theme: a head with brain and often eyes, a backbone and often four limbs in equal numbers on both sides of the body. It’s the invertebrates, in the thirty-four other groups, that are bursting with ancient and unusual capabilities, born of hundreds of millions of years of living in the sea.”
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Harvell’s book focuses on sea sponges, corals, sea slugs, sea fans, giant clams, octopuses and jellies. All these creatures, besides being quite cool and some pushing the limits of what an average person would consider an “animal” also have quite amazing superpowers which may also benefit us, if we need other reasons to admire them besides their awesomeness.

Starfish skin is absolutely amazing, changing its properties in a fraction of a second. Seagrass fields can help clean up the filthy ocean messes that are our doing. Many important chemicals and organelles that sea creatures rely on for survival are actually ingested from their prey in a very strange symbiosis, and if we figure out how some of this stuff works it may be life-changing as far as organ transplants go. Sponges are hosts for bacteria that can have amazing implications for medicine. Far from being a sedentary slow creature, starfish is quite a “superpowered predator” and shapes the entire environments around itself. Octopuses’ shapeshifting and camouflage abilities are from the realm of fantastical, really. And of course, amazing coral reefs built entire ecosystems, and luckily it seems that some strains may be better able to tolerate changing climate, so maybe those amazing ecosystems are not they completely doomed.
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“Marine invertebrates are my life’s passion and somehow, it’s the very ancient and seemingly simpler ones that I find most captivating and surprising: the sponges, corals, jellyfish, and sea slugs. Although less well known than beloved whales and dolphins, the spineless biota manages the balance of nature in the oceans through creating habitats like coral reefs, controlling the flow of energy through entire food webs, and engineering transformations that baffle scientists to this day.”
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I think a few more photos in addition to the lovely drawings would have been nice (but I read the ARC version, and I’m not sure if final book has those), but at least I spent hours online looking up endless photos of the ocean’s menagerie.

Now, I do wonder why it took me weeks and weeks to finish this book, and I can only chalk it down to something about it making my attention slide off the pages after a few minutes each time, although every time those few minutes weren’t actually boring. But in any case, I’ll keep an eye out for Harvell’s books.

3.5 stars.
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Thanks to NetGalley and Viking Penguin for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I used this copy of The Ocean's Menagerie to cross-references facts about the book for a podcast episode. The included notes and references were helpful when included, but some of the scientific claims did not include those notes or references. I understand that including extensive citations can be cumbersome, but would have appreciated more extensive referencing, especially for the clinical trials mentioned in the book.

If you like Sy Montgomery’s books about the wonders of the natural world, then you’ll love Harvell’s peak at all the miraculous creatures living in our oceans