Book Review: Monarchs of the Sea by Danna Staaf

While I was at my local Barnes & Noble looking for a book to celebrate the end of a ten-month-long Tax Season, I happened on a little volume in the Science section: Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods by Danna Staaf. I had done a paper on the chambered nautilus in 7th grade, and I’ve recently developed an appreciation for octopuses (the form of the plural Dr. Staaf uses in her book) from watching them on BBC Earth, so buying it was a no-brainer. The result was a fun, quick read through a fascinating work on biology. As soon as I finished, I knew my next blog post had to be a review of this delightful work.

Even though I don’t think Dr. Staaf intended to give Him any credit in her work, I found myself glorifying God for His creative wisdom on page after page of the book. That’s actually quite easy with any well-done science book: just read the word “design” or “wisdom” wherever the author uses “evolution.” Cephalopods can change colors in a matter of seconds or less, even though the prevailing wisdom is that their eyes, while very acute, are colorblind. The resolution to this seeming paradox is that they might detect color through the neurons in their arms. Squids use ammonia to keep themselves buoyant in water since water with dissolved ammonia chloride is less dense than water with sodium chloride. They are also the mainstay of countless species’ diets. When marine mammals “seek their meat from God” (Psalm 104:21, KJV), the odds are very good that He gives them some type of squid. Squids reproduce, grow, and die quickly, so millions of them are available to feed these predators in a vital contribution to the food web. Amazingly, the biggest squids, the infamous giant variety, grow to astonishing lengths after being birthed as rice-grain-sized babies, in a formula of growth and energy so fast it defies our ability to explain it.

This book also corrected some of my misunderstandings. I thought ammonites/ammonoids and nautiluses were directly related to one another from my misremembering my paper, but nautiluses are actually cousins of ammonoids. The book goes to great pains to explain why ammonoids, after surviving so many of the mass extinction events “by the skin of their teeth” (not that they really had any) finally succumbed to the oblivion of extinction while nautiluses survived to become one of the oldest surviving species on earth. Nautiluses enjoy their own form of buoyancy design with a tube into the chambers of its shells that pumps water out and allows gas to diffuse into the chambers. Unfortunately, nautiluses have not weathered recent human activity as well as the volcanoes and acidification of the oceans of the past, their small and fragile populations hardly keeping up with the rate at which they are caught for their beautiful shells. I was relieved to learn they had finally gained some protection as of the date of publication of this book.

Octopuses of course featured prominently as well. The author’s pet octopus would play tug-of-war with her with calculated force to prolong the game. Octopuses can change the appearance of their skin for amazing camouflage or imitation of other species. One species takes coconut shells discarded by humans and hides within them, using two legs to walk along the ocean floor with a return to the shell of its ancestors. Others simply squeeze into crevices too narrow for any vertebrate to get at them. The giant Pacific octopus is not on the endangered list, I’m happy to say. And, of course, Dr. Staaf regales us with the famous story of Inky’s escape from a New Zealand aquarium down a drain to get back to the ocean.

Probably most delightful of all is the author’s wittiness. She has a very playful, conversational tone throughout her book, with plenty of banter, sarcasm, and little jokes. The writing kept me hooked for certain. She also can’t resist comparisons between dinosaur paleontology and cephalopod paleontology, the gap between which in visibility to the public this book was largely written to address.

If the book has any downsides, I’d say there’s one that simply can’t be helped: most of the names of the extinct species and groups are hard to remember. Like dinosaurs, we know these species by their Latin/Greek scientific names rather than by common names, but unlike dinosaurs, I haven’t been studying these creatures since I was a kid with a sponge-like brain for names. When Dr. Staaf describes one type of cephalopod on one page and returns to a discussion of it later, it’s a little hard to remember which one she is talking about. Not much she can do about that, I’m afraid, but it did make the book rather bewildering at points.

Anyway, on the whole, great book! Fascinating and God-glorifying in the best traditions of science. If you like Blue Planet or Planet Earth by BBC Earth, this book might well be up your alley. I intend to go back to Barnes and Noble for another science book very soon.