Includes bibliographical references and index.

Quest for the living Blaschka animals -- Anemones and corals: the rooted lives of at-risk animals -- Jellyfish: rise of the medusa -- Worms: ecosystem engineers undercover -- Sea slugs: fire stealers of the deep -- Octopus and squid: shape-shifters under pressure -- Sea stars: keystone species in glass -- The voyage of our Blaschka biodiversity -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix: primer on the Blaschka Tree of Life.

"From diving for dangerous jellyfish in the Mediterranean to searching for harpoon-backed sea slugs in Southeast Asia, A Sea of Glass recounts the author's quest to document the living invertebrates that inspired history's greatest father-son glassmaking team to spin their likenesses into glass more than 160 years ago. The story of these artists, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, whose menagerie of unusual marine creatures was packed away for decades in a Cornell University storage unit, provides a time capsule of life in earlier oceans untouched by climate change and human impacts. A Sea of Glass takes readers into a world rarely glimpsed, introducing the surprising and unusual biology of some of the most ancient animals on the tree of life. On the way, we glimpse a century of change in our ocean ecosystems and learn which of the Blaschkas's living counterparts are indeed as fragile as glass"--Provided by publisher.

1 2