90 books like A Life Underwater

Dr. C. Drew Harvell is an American marine biologist who has worked extensively on the diseases of corals and other marine organisms. She starts this book with an urgent e-mail in December 2013 – sea stars were dying in Monterey, California, and Drew dropped everything to race off to find out what she could.  That is not an exaggeration. In recent years, her life has been like that. While the book deals with serious diseases having huge consequences for various marine organisms, it also reveals the way in which marine biologists can be immersed in their work yet love every minute and find ways to marvel at the mystery that is life on this planet. 

An outstanding teacher as well as researcher, Drew’s ability to captivate, then skillfully mentor students, comes through loud and clear. She captivates us too, making the subject of marine diseases (of organisms most of us… show more.

There has been growing recognition that our scientific understanding of environmental matters can be enhanced if we would only listen to the wisdom of indigenous peoples. This recognition only occasionally leads to a serious effort by environmental scientists to learn from indigenous peoples. Dr. Robert Johannes was a tropical fisheries biologist who, in the mid-1970s, was well ahead of his time when he took time out of a busy academic career to spend a couple of years on tiny, remote islands in Palau, Micronesia to learn from elders how to catch fish. This book is a non-technical account of what he learned. It reveals the considerable depth of knowledge on fishes, their habits, and effective ways to catch them that Micronesian natives possessed, and it also reveals the humility and humanity of its author. 

After this experience, Johannes devoted the rest of his career to ensuring that traditional knowledge was… show more.

Dr. Callum Roberts is a British marine biologist who has worked primarily in marine conservation. Like many British coral reef scientists, he got his start in the Red Sea rather than the Caribbean or the Pacific. The cultures of the middle east can make reef research there just a little bit different than elsewhere. This book is his memoir of a wonderful life exploring coral reefs that began, surprisingly, in the wilds of Scotland and took shape once he began his undergraduate studies in 1980. By then our impacts on coral reefs were becoming quite stark and this book does not shrink from the bad news. But it also captures his sheer joy in exploring coral reefs, his good humor and creativity as he grows from young student to research leader, and his concern to do what he can to keep coral reefs with us.

Not a book written by a coral reef biologist, this is a book by a non-scientist about how coral reef scientists cope with the knowledge that our degradation of reef ecosystems around the world is close to terminal. Our impacts on reefs, through climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, pollution, and many other forms of local disrespect have been going on ever since reef research really took off in the early 1960s, following the invention of SCUBA by Jacques Cousteau. Irus Braverman learned to dive in 1989 when she lived in Israel; the first reefs she saw were in the Red Sea. She loved diving, but it was only much later, 2015, when she began to wonder about what was happening to reefs, and how that might affect the scientists who have devoted their lives to exploring these captivating places. 

A series of interviews and some travel to reefs provided the… show more.

That’s right: that Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of the Species. Seventeen years before that ground-shaking book, he wrote what marine scientists tell me remains the definitive work on the structure of coral reefs. Forget the famous Punch caricature of the gray-haired man trailing a long beard and a chimpanzee and think of the youthful naturalist daring crashing waves to vault to the edge of a South Pacific fringe reef. In places his accounts read like True Adventures for Boys.   

This standout picture book biography shows how environmental scientist Ken Nedimyer’s lifelong love of the ocean eventually led to his quest to help save and restore the beautiful coral reefs of his native Florida and beyond.

Along the way, Messner’s gentle narrative reinforces the notion that all great efforts start with just one life, one moment, one idea, one step forward. And Forsythe’s equally gentle illustrations softly illuminate the worlds both above and below water.

Ready for a deep dive to learn all about the world’s oceans?

Tag along with Professor Astro Cat and his friends as they explore from the seashore to the deepest depths of the oceans and everything in between. It's equally as much fun to visually enjoy this book's amazing illustrations as it is to devour all the fascinating facts!

Ann Elias demonstrates how visual media – photography, film, art, and museum displays – re-cast coral reefs in the early 20th century from dangers to navigation into fantastical but familiar and inviting spectacles. Coral Empire reveals photographers, artists, and scientific explorers as they rendered the undersea modern yet colonial. Using technology, indigenous knowledge, and their own visions, they presented the oceans as wild, untouched spaces full of resources that invited exploitation, conquest, and tourism. Desire-fueled uses of the undersea obscured the destructive nature of human activities on coral reefs, now abundantly apparent, while the power of the visual for imagining and knowing the undersea remains.

The relationship between ourselves and the sea is commonly constrained by beaches and tides. But Julia Whitty, deep-sea diver, and filmmaker opens the mind to the richness of deep waters through the scientific and soulful journeys she poetically shares in this book. Her time spent working in the South Pacific allows an expansion of our own experiences of the wild world. The delicate relationships of life’s many forms, from whales and sharks to rays and coral, contained within Earth’s liquid artistry, offers an opportunity to enrich our understanding of connections we seldom perceive but which, once acknowledged, expand the perception of life’s wealth.

Jellyfish may be lacking bones, blood, and brains, but they are full of mystery.

To me, the most compelling narrative nonfiction tells something about the author as well as their subject, becoming part memoir while explaining the research process.

I read this book as research for my nonfiction children’s book on jellyfish, but I learned so much more—about the worldwide jellyfish research community, the past and future health of our oceans, both the perils and possibilities of ever-increasing jellyfish populations, and Juli Berwald’s journey to reclaim her love of the ocean.

Discover some cutting-edge science and marvel at these simple but beautiful blobs from below.