A Good Read,

for next week,

luminous fungi, flashing fish, “phosphorescent” seas—for centuries, naturalists have tried to explain the hows and whys of bioluminescence, the ability of organisms to create their own light, in Luminous Creatures, author Michel Anctil explores these crafty organisms and how people came to understand and study the ecology, evolution, and molecular biology of bioluminescence, 

as a review in Science notes, the book is “profoundly well researched, scientifically accurate, and provides a unique view into the lives of bioluminescence scientists through the ages.” but this book goes deeper into the lives of the very people that made so many fascinating discoveries, 

 for example, bioluminescent animals and fungi were the test subjects that revealed that oxygen was the essential gas for biological processes in experiments conducted in the 17th and 18th centuries, the invention of the bathysphere, a spherical deep-sea submersible developed in the 1920s, was driven by a researcher’s desire to observe bioluminescence in situ, 

the earliest use of research submersibles and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) was to observe and collect bioluminescent animals, even more important, Luminous Creatures provides an unparalleled holistic narrative of the development of oceanography as a scientific practice, the characters that drove the efforts, and the animals that they studied, records from oceanographic expeditions in the 19th century are full of stories about living specimens bioluminescing aboard ships, this promises to be a great read, and no I am not on commision and yes I would like a copy.