Photo: Masaki Miya et al. Wikimedia Creative Commons
Anglerfish use bioluminescence to attract their prey in the darkest depths of the ocean.
When John was little, he liked a book called Fish Do the Strangest Things. Strangeness is a great focus for a nature book, because everyone likes offbeat critters.
Steve Curwood, founder of the radio show Living on Earth, recently interviewed the author of a book that focuses on the strangeness of ocean life.
CURWOOD: “In an engaging new book called The Extreme Life of the Sea, biologist Steve Palumbi and his novelist son Tony deepen our understanding of how strange sea life has managed to survive against all odds. … Why did you write this book. Why now?
PALUMBI: “Well, the real reason is that we’re trying an experiment: can you take the narrative style and approach that a novelist would use and combine it with what a scientist would do? … You don’t really care about the plot until you care about the characters, and so we wanted to write a book that made you care about the characters.
CURWOOD: “Now, you write about the extreme life of the sea, the oldest, the hottest, the shallowest, to name a few. Why did you choose this approach?
PALUMBI: “Because it was a way of getting people’s attention to the really sort of amazing things that these critters do. Organisms in the sea live in some of the hottest places, they live in some of the coldest places, and how they do that is something marine scientists have paid a lot of attention to. So it was really a way to make it more engaging, more fun, and to let us move credibly between different kinds of organisms all in the same chapter. …
CURWOOD: “You had one extreme that you called immortal.
PALUMBI: “That’s an amazing jellyfish called turritopsis, and it has the remarkable ability to age in reverse. So when the environment is bad, this animal can essentially go from its adult body form back, back, back to its larval form, and then start all over again. … It’s called transdifferentiation. It’s the only critter known to be able to do that.”
More here, where you can read the rest of the transcript and listen to the recording. It’s all pretty amazing.
Photo: Eddie Welker, Flickr Creative Commons 2.0)
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