Super Natural: How Life Thrives in Impossible Places

(Hardback)

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From scorching deserts to frozen seabeds, from the highest peaks of the Himalaya to the hadal depths of the oceans, there are habitats on this Earth that appear inimical to life - yet in which it flourishes nevertheless. During the midday heat of the Sahara, silvery ants sprint from their nests to feed. In North American forests, wood frogs awaken each spring from solid blocks of ice. At the site of the Chernobyl disaster, fungi harness radiation to thrive.

Transporting readers to far-flung environments we could never call home, Super Natural paints an awe-inspiring portrait of life's resilience and ingenuity under the harshest circumstances. We meet creatures exquisitely adapted to endure unimaginable deprivations: of water, oxygen, food, sunlight. Alex Riley shows how, at nature's extremes, the rules of life as we know them are rewritten - and how, here, we can find hope for the future of life on Earth, and beyond.

Reviews

A celebration of the most extreme, extraordinary, and eccentric things that life is capable of. Alex Riley writes with joy and passion, and each page brings a new revelation about the resiliency of life. * Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh palaeontologist and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs *
Super Natural is a book filled with nature's wonders: painted turtles that don't take a breath for six months, kangaroo rats that survive without drinking water, icefish with no haemoglobin in the Antarctic and bar-headed geese that migrate across the Himalaya at 7000 metres. It's about resilience, endurance and ingenuity - about finding a niche or a different way of being alive - and it's a combination that gives hope in our troubled times. * Andrea Wulf, award-winning author of The Invention of Nature *
Deeply researched and wide-ranging, Super Natural is a veritable smorgasbord of astonishing facts about our planet's most resilient creatures. Alex Riley is an eagle-eyed, golden-hearted, and entertaining guide, adept at toggling between the micro and macro, attuned to both the humour and awe of the natural world, and never failing to provide his each and every subject with the loving attention it deserves. * Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth *
A thrilling and original way to explore nature - the science is fascinating. * Tristan Gooley, Sunday Times bestselling author of How to Read a Tree *
It is curiously heartening to discover, from Alex Riley's brilliantly researched catalogue of resilient species, that life has a way of surviving any calamity. He cheerfully disproves all one's assumptions about life forms needing oxygen or light, and not to be fried, crushed, frozen or irradiated. At a time when extinctions are thought to be accelerating because of climate change and human development, it somehow filled me with hope to read that out there in apparently inhospitable places life is finding a way. * Charles Clover, award-winning author of The End of the Line *
Super Natural is a mind-expanding romp through Earth's most extreme environments and the astonishing creatures who flourish in them. With awe and curiosity, Alex Riley plumbs the abyssal plains, the polar ice caps, and every habitat in between to reveal the tenacity, diversity, and flat-out weirdness of life on our harsh, hospitable planet. * Ben Goldfarb, award-winning author of Crossings *
A lively and fascinating exploration of how life not only persists, but thrives at the extremes. By bringing these often shocking edges into vivid focus, we come to see the whole of life, ourselves included, more clearly. * David George Haskell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Sounds Wild and Broken. *

Author Bio

Alex Riley is an award-winning science writer focusing on long-form features in evolutionary biology, conservation and health. His work has appeared in Aeon, Nautilus, New Scientist, BBC Earth and BBC Future. His first book, A Cure for Darkness, was published by Ebury in 2021.