Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean

Mingling mythology with science, Whitty pulls readers into the watery depths of the oceans, home to the birds, whales, and other mysterious creatures that have been her lifetime passion. She writes of Isla Rasa in the Gulf of California in Mexico during the short springtime breeding season, when “the island mushrooms into a jittery cloud visible for miles”; off the coast of Newfoundland, she encounters the “annual migration of the icebergs, a spectacle as grand as the exodus of wildebeest through the Serengeti,” and a leatherback sea turtle with “flippers the size of oars, and a head like a draft horse's, wearing a jellyfish mane.” Whitty's biology is colored by “the gods of rock and the goddesses of seawater,” such as Rasa, the Hindu “mythical river flowing around the world,” and the Elivágar, from the Viking creation story. This luminous prose is disturbed by accompanying reports of human-induced damage of oceanic ecosystems, where “market economics relentlessly drives commercially desirable species towards extinction” like a modern plague, exemplified by the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, which caused a “trophic cascade” transforming all aspects of the ecosystem “from crab to zooplankton to phytoplankton to nitrates.” (July)