Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus does for the creature what Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk did for raptors. --New Statesman, UK

One of the best science books of the year. --Science Friday, NPR

A New York Times bestseller from the author of The Good Good Pig, this fascinating...touching...informative...entertaining (The Daily Beast) book explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus--a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature--and the remarkable connections it makes with humans.

In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities--gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple sleights of hand to get food.

Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal's color-changing techniques. With her joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures (Library Journal Editors' Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds.

Learn from an international bestselling author, the world's brightest octopus researchers, and vivid National Geographic photography to come closer than ever to these elusive creatures.

The companion to the highly-anticipated National Geographic Disney+ special Secrets of the Octopus, narrated by Paul Rudd, this beautifully illustrated book explores the underwater world of the octopus--a creature that resembles an alien lifeform, but whose behavior has earned it a reputation as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet.

This journey into the world of the octopus will reveal how the large and capable brain of these creatures occupies their whole body-not just their heads--and they can actually adjust their genetic makeup to respond to the demands of the environment. It will allow readers to watch them change shape and color in order to camouflage themselves more effectively than any other species. And it will divulge how octopus mothers give their all in order to bring forth a new generation.

With this offering, acclaimed author Sy Montgomery--known, thanks to her bestselling book, as the octopus whisperer--returns to the species she knows and loves, offering current and compassionate stories about the scientists on the front lines of octopus research and conservation.

For all animal lovers--and especially those drawn to this magical marine being--this will be a book to relish, for both its fascinating imagery and its charming storytelling.

Will keep you on the edge of your seat from its first page to its last page.--Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

Sharks have been fighting for their lives for 500 million years and today are under dire threat. They are the longest-surviving vertebrate on Earth, outlasting multiple mass extinction events that decimated life on the planet. But how did they thrive for so long? By developing superpower-like abilities that allowed them to ascend to the top of the oceanic food chain.

John Long, who for decades has been on the cutting edge of shark research, weaves a thrilling story of sharks' unparalleled reign. The Secret History of Sharks showcases the global search to discover sharks' largely unknown evolution, led by Long and dozens of other extraordinary scientists. They embark on digs to all seven continents, investigating layers of rock and using cutting-edge technology to reveal never-before-found fossils and the clues to sharks' singular story.

As the tale unfolds, Long introduces an enormous range of astonishing organisms: a thirty-foot-long shark with a deadly saw blade of jagged teeth protruding from its lower jaws, a monster giant clams crusher, and bizarre sharks fossilized while in their mating ritual. The book also includes startling new facts about the mighty megalodon, with its sixty-six-foot-long body, massive jaws, and six-inch serrated teeth.

With insights into the threats to sharks today, how they contribute to medical advances, and the lessons they can teach us about our own survival, The Secret History of Sharks is a riveting look at scientific discovery with ramifications far beyond the ocean.

This scientifically accurate yet utterly charming field guide to the Pacific coast intertidal zone introduces readers to a world populated by spectacular wildlife.

Explore 150-year-old giant green anemones that paralyze their prey with their petal-like tentacles; sunflower sea stars that traverse the tide pool floor on twenty-four limbs; orange-tipped, opalescent sea slugs that dabble in cannibalism; and much, much more. Small enough to fit in a back pocket during a beach hike, this guide contains concise descriptions of tide pools' most common residents, noting each organism's size and zonation, as well as a few of its fascinating (and sometimes grotesque) habits. Full-color illustrations reminiscent of prints by Ernst Haeckel help tide poolers with easy identification, and tips for viewing help you explore the abundance that tide pools have to offer.

Among all the ocean's creatures, few are more captivating--or more elusive--than the octopus. Marine biologist David Scheel investigates these strange beings to try and answer long-held questions: How can we learn more about an animal whose perfect camouflage and secretive habitats make them invisible to detection? How does an almost-boneless package of muscle and protein defeat sharks, eels, and other predators, while also preying on the most heavily armored animals in the sea? How do octopus bodies even work?

Octopuses are both fierce predators and vulnerable prey; they are antisocial jerks but also neat-freak roommates; they are in every ocean habitat and yet, being rarely encountered, nowhere at all. This fascinating and engaging middle grade adaptation of Many Things Under a Rock shows young readers how to embrace the wisdom of the unknown--even if it has more arms than expected.

Ellen Ruppel Shell's Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature--the eel--a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business.

What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world's most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels--as unagi--are another thing: delicious.

In Slippery Beast, journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell travels in the world of eel people, pursuing a burgeoning fascination with this mysterious and highly coveted creature. Despite centuries of study by celebrated thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to a young Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown, including exactly how eels beget other eels. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity, and as a result, infant eels are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed elvers caught in the cold fresh waters of Maine can command $3,000 or more on the black market. Illegal trade in eels is an international scandal measured in billions of dollars every year. In Maine, federal investigators have risked their lives to bust poaching rings, including the notorious half-decade-long Operation Broken Glass.

Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America's first commercial eel family farm, which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.

Filled with reverence and wonder for the natural world, this captivating book reveals the secret life of sea turtles, one of the oldest living creatures on Earth, and the story of one female scientist's fight to save their future.

In 2015, a team of researchers carefully removed a plastic straw from a sea turtle's nostril off the coast of Costa Rica. The disturbing incident, which was captured on video, went viral, leading to corporate straw bans around the world. In this evocative book, reminiscent of Jane Goodall's memoir In the Shadow of Man, the marine biologist behind the camera, Christine Figgener, recounts her own life spent studying and protecting sea turtles.

From the time she was a young girl, Figgener was determined to become a biologist, and study the marvels of the marine world. In My Life With Sea Turtles, she shares how she went from a small, gray town on the edge of industry to the lush coastline of Costa Rica, where she fell in love with the local environment and its famous residents: the sea turtles.

Figgener describes patrolling the beach at night, swimming with turtles in the open ocean, watching tiny turtles emerge from sandy nests, and risking her life during tropical storms. We learn about her experience as a woman in conservation, a male dominated space where she struggles to be taken seriously. Through discovering the fascinating science of sea turtles and the threats they face today, readers will be inspired to live their own lives differently to ensure the survival of these magnificent creatures.

Adam Nicolson explores the marine life inhabiting seashore rock pools with a scientist's curiosity and a poet's wonder in this beautifully illustrated book.

The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the rocks and the living will say hello.

Inside each rock pool tucked into one of the infinite crevices of the tidal coastline lies a rippling, silent, unknowable universe. Below the stillness of the surface course different currents of endless motion--the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady forward propulsion of the passage of time, and the tiny lifetimes of the rock pool's creatures, all of which coalesce into the grand narrative of evolution.

In Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn's head become a medieval helmet and a group of winkles transform into a Dickensian social scene, with mollusks munching on Stilton and glancing at their pocket watches. Or, rather, is a winkle more like Achilles, an ancient hero, throwing himself toward death for the sake of glory? For Nicolson, who writes with scientific rigor and a poet's sense of wonder (The American Scholar), the world of the rock pools is infinite and as intricate as our own.

As Nicolson journeys between the tides, both in the pools he builds along the coast of Scotland and through the timeline of scientific discovery, he is accompanied by great thinkers--no one can escape the pull of the sea. We meet Virginia Woolf and her Waves; a young T. S. Eliot peering into his own rock pool in Massachusetts; even Nicolson's father-in-law, a classical scholar who would hunt for amethysts along the shoreline, his mind on Heraclitus and the other philosophers of ancient Greece. And, of course, scientists populate the pages; not only their discoveries, but also their doubts and errors, their moments of quiet observation and their thrilling realizations.

Everything is within the rock pools, where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the miraculous an inch beneath your nose. The soul wants to be wet, Heraclitus said in Ephesus twenty-five hundred years ago. This marvelous book demonstrates why it is so.

Includes Color and Black-and-White Photographs

At last: the story of tracking the ocean's most charismatic and controversial predator, compellingly told by the man who has learned more about the Atlantic great white shark than any other person alive. You must not miss this fantastic book! --Sy Montgomery, New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of an Octopus

Dr. Greg Skomal, one of the leading great white shark experts in the country, reveals the true nature of these mysterious apex predators, as well as the fascinating story behind their history and startling resurgence

With its quaint villages, local restaurants serving up lobster rolls, and miles and miles of warm, sandy beaches, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is famous for being America's carefree seaside getaway. But in August 2012, the first confirmed white shark attack in almost eighty years occurred in the region. As shark sightings quickly began to increase on Cape Cod and elsewhere, and large beachside billboards warning about the growing shark population became a common sight, a boogie boarder died after being attacked by a great white shark in Cape Cod's shallow waters. What had changed to cause news of human-shark interactions to go from being a rarity to being the new normal? As some citizens called for shark culls, nets, drone surveillance, and other extreme solu-tions, interactions between local residents and scientists, politicians, and those responsible for public safety became tense and frantic.

Dr. Greg Skomal, a shark biologist whose lifelong passion has been to gain a more refined understanding of great white sharks, was at the center of it all. This is the story of the great white shark's return to the east-ern seaboard, told through the life of the scientist who found himself in the oftentimes thankless position of having to balance conservation efforts and the drive to do important science with panic and fear in the court of public opinion. Greg has spent decades on a quest to tag, track, and demystify this animal, using every high- and low-tech method at his disposal, including those he invented, and he frequently comes face-to-face with these shadows of the deep. He leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of the secrets behind the largely unknown lives of these charismatic creatures and in his duty to solve the intricate puzzle of how humans can coexist alongside them. Chasing Shadows is a too-rare conservation success story about restoring an apex predator to an ecosystem that provides a profound, new understanding of a beast so notoriously fierce that it's nearly impossible to imagine how vulnerable it truly is.

The guide provides a boon of information for diving photographers and underwater naturalists, known as critter hunters, who enjoy one of the most challenging games in the sea - searching for charismatic min

The Southern Resident killer whales are icons of the Pacific Northwest, a beloved population of orcas that are considered the most-watched whales in the world. Despite decades of research and focused conservation efforts, they are on the brink of extinction.

Each year J-, K-, and L-Pods return to the inland waters of Washington State and British Columbia, a region known as the Salish Sea, where scientists and whale watchers alike know them as individuals. J2 Granny lost relatives to captivity but went on to lead her family for decades. The controversial satellite tagging of K25 Scoter reshaped orca conservation efforts. L112 Sooke was only three years old when she washed up dead from blunt force trauma to the head on the outer coast, a death shrouded in mystery.

From the capture era and the beginning of killer whale research to the whale-watching boom and endangered listing, the whole story of the Southern Residents is told here. Our relationship to these whales, complicated by both the positive attachments and negative politics we have created around them, has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. With more challenges on the horizon, one question looms: can we still create a sustainable future for humans and orcas in the Salish Sea?

Orcas are one of Earth's most intelligent animals. Benign and gentle, with their own languages and cultures, orcas' amazing capacity for long-term memory and, arguably, compassion, makes the ugly story of the captive-orca industry especially damning.

In the tradition of Barry Lopez's classic Of Wolves and Men, David Neiwert's book is a powerful tribute to one of the animal kingdom's most remarkable members.

Powerful and beautifully written. --Jane Goodall

A charming, richly illustrated, pocket-size exploration of the world's whales

Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile any nature lover. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with color photographs and original color artwork, The Little Book of Whales is an accessible and enjoyable mini-reference about the world's whales, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics--from anatomy, diversity, and reproduction to habitat and conservation. It also includes curious facts and a section on whales in myths and folklore from around the world. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing lives of whales.

• A beautifully designed pocket-size book with a foil-stamped cloth cover
• Features some 140 color illustrations and photos
• Makes a perfect gift

Lobster is served three ways in this fascinating book: by fisherman, scientist and the crustaceans themselves. . . . Corson, who worked aboard commercial lobster boats for two years, weaves together these three worlds. The human worlds are surely interesting; but they can't top the lobster life on the ocean floor. -- Washington Post

In this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and an eccentric band of renegade biologists, journalist Trevor Corson escorts the reader onto the slippery decks of fishing boats, through danger-filled scuba dives, and deep into the churning currents of the Gulf of Maine to learn about the secret undersea lives of lobsters.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus does for the creature what Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk did for raptors. --New Statesman, UK

One of the best science books of the year. --Science Friday, NPR

Another New York Times bestseller from the author of The Good Good Pig, this fascinating...touching...informative...entertaining (The Daily Beast) book explores the emotional and physical world of the octopus--a surprisingly complex, intelligent, and spirited creature--and the remarkable connections it makes with humans.

In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities--gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple sleights of hand to get food.

Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal's color-changing techniques. With her joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures (Library Journal Editors' Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds.

This complete and colorful guide covers all of the 370+ species of shallow-water sea slugs known to occur from Alaska to Central America. In addition to size, range, and habitat descriptions, it also provides information on color variations, eggs, and convenient tips on how to distinguish them from similar species. Richly illustrated with color photos contributed by over 50 of the best nudie photographers on the west coast, it is an essential reference for divers, beachcombers, underwater photographers, and anyone else with an interest in this fascinating group.

The most comprehensive reference guide to the world's sharks--now fully revised and updated

Sharks of the World is the essential illustrated guide for anyone interested in these magnificent creatures. Now fully revised and updated, it covers 536 of the world's shark species and is packed with colour illustrations, colour photos and informative diagrams. This comprehensive, easy-to-use reference guide incorporates the latest taxonomic revisions of many shark families, featuring many species that were only described in recent years. It also includes a completely revised and expanded introduction and updated line drawings throughout.

• Covers 536 shark species from around the world
• Features updated species accounts, illustrations and maps
• Gives an illustrated overview of shark biology, ecology and conservation
• Includes fin identification guides
• Provides a colour distribution map for every species

Everyone alive today is witnessing a mass extinction event caused by the more than eight billion humans who share this planet. At times, it seems there is little hope. Climate change, resource exploitation, agrochemicals, overfishing, plastics, dead zones in our oceans, drought and desertification, conversion of habitat to housing, farming, and industrial infrastructure--the list of impacts and insults goes on and on. We are, it seems, on an unalterable path that will continue to decimate biodiversity.

A feeling of hopelessness, while not unwarranted, is part of the problem. Without hope, without some belief in the possibility of positive outcomes, the fight for nature is over. Why even try if the battle is already lost?

While staring the problems squarely in the face, A Sea Full of Turtles offers hope for those who care about our living world. Delivered as a travel narrative set in Mexico's Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez), at one level the book focuses on dramatically underfunded but highly successful efforts to protect sea turtles. But the book goes beyond Mexico and beyond sea turtles to look at how some humans have changed their relationship with nature--and how that change can one day end the extinction crisis.

Enchanting, galvanizing, and brimming with joy and wonder, A Sea Full of Turtles will inspire immediate action to face the great challenges that lie ahead. Pessimism is the lazy way out. Optimism, it turns out, is both a reasonable and an essential attitude for us all as we fight for the beautiful diversity of life on our Earth.