I heard Edith Widder on Unexplainable – one of my very favourite podcasts, such that I went back and listened to the year’s worth of episodes that happened before I found them (c/ Gastropod, another of my very favourite podcasts). She talked about deciding to use red light rather than white light when exploring the mid ocean and how that was a new thing, when she suggested it, and I was both boggled and entranced. I love me a good deep-sea exploration story, so when I discovered that the library had her book, I grabbed it.

I realise that the subtitle is “a memoir of…” but I didn’t realise that this was actually a memoir – that is, there’s more about her personal life than I had expected. Which isn’t a problem, it simply surprised me. Pretty much everything she talks about from her personal life is tied to her professional life, so in that sense it is very much a memoir rather than an autobiography: we don’t learn everything about her childhood, just about the very dramatic events that led her to eventually study bioluminescence and marine biology.

(Yes, I was one of those children who thought being a marine biologist would be cool. Yes, I thought it would involve whales and dolphins rather than plankton. No, I don’t love boats that much.)

Widder has been a leading light (heh, heh) for many decades in studying bioluminescence, and in figuring out how to video critters in the mid ocean – the largest living space on the planet – without actually interfering with their natural behaviour. If you’re interested in giant squid, you may actually already know of her: she’s responsible for the first footage of one underwater. She discusses a lot more than that, of course – ups and downs in research, things not going as planned, and generally learning really cool stuff about the place we know the least about on our planet. It’s nearly a cliche that we have better maps of the back side of the moon than of the depths of the ocean… but it’s true.

This book is awesome. The one thing I will say is that she does occasionally go on environmental tangents that feel disconnected from the rest of the chapter. Don’t get me wrong, she’s absolutely right and the book is absolutely the right place to be making the points (because I know she says it elsewhere as well). It just didn’t flow as seamlessly as it might have, which was a bit jarring overall. Nonetheless, it is generally really well written, and Widder has a brilliant sense of humour which often comes out in her footnotes. My very favourite is in discussion of the comparison of eye size, when she gives metric measurements for a giant squid’s eyes (30cm), and then says that in “American units” that’s 1/5 Danny DeVito’s height.

Highly recommended for my fellow science nerds, and fans of ocean science in particular.