Lisa-Ann Gershwin

Good books on jellyfish are hard to find: there hardly exist any. I’ve had the German ‘Quallen’ by Thomas Heeger (2004) for years, and that used to be the only comprehensive scientific monograph on the subject: someone should translate that in English.

I’m fascinated by the subject, so when I saw this very book in the biography of the underwhelming little book on jellyfish that Peter Williams published in 2020 I bought it instantly.

This book isn’t really about 50 jellyfish as advertised on the back: it rather is a monograph on 5 subjects: jellyfish anatomy, life history, taxonomy and evolution, ecology and finally the impact of humanity on jellyfish. Each subject gets about 20 pages in text (and some graphics & pictures), and after that Gershwin each time presents 10 jellyfish that illustrate some of the stuff from that particular chapter’s subject. Each jellyfish gets a full page photograph, and one page with additional information.

This makes for a bit of a hybrid: this is both a coffee table book with great, clear illustrations & a fairly thorough introduction to jellyfish biology. I doubt experienced marine biologists with an interest in the subject will learn a lot of new things from Gershwin, but for the general public the book is detailed nonetheless. As a reading experience, the format gets a bit monotonous towards the end – especially as the end chapter is the least interesting of all, with the least depth. Still, let me be clear: this is – by far – the best book on jellyfish available. If you want more, you’ll need to dive in the world of scientific journals.

The book shows there is an enormous variation in jellyfish: there are much more differences between some species of jellyfish than there are differences between humans and, let’s say, turtles, or cod, or jays. On the other hand, salps are more closely related to humans than bees or scorpions. The list of nuggets at the end of this review shows a bit of this diversity.

The other important takeaway is a strong reinforcement of the realization that science has only begun to understand and map the diversity of complex life on our planet. Most stuff about jellyfish remains undiscovered and unknown, including basic stuff like the life cycle for lots of species. It’s like Nigel Pitman wrote in an article for Nautilus in 2015: “What the models tell us is that several thousand of the tree species that grow in the Amazon are so rare that scientists will never find them.”

Let me finish this review with some nuggets of knowledge I want to remember:

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