SUPER NATURAL

An entertaining overview of organisms that live their lives in brutal environments.

That oddball life forms survive being boiled, radiated, dehydrated, or frozen is no news to many readers, but even they may sit up to learn how, given time, natural selection can do the same for familiar creatures, writes science writer Riley, author of A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It. A camel can lose 30 percent of its body water and function normally; humans die after losing 12 percent. Desert kangaroo rats never drink and exist mostly on dry seeds, but they obtain enough water by recycling their waste products. Turtles in Canada pass months on the bottom of frozen ponds without breathing. Wood frogs in Alaska freeze solid throughout the winter. Beetles and ground squirrels in Alaska survive these months but never freeze. Using antifreeze proteins and cryoprotectants, they “supercool”—their body fluids remain liquid despite temperatures far below zero. Under Antarctic ice, fish and other sea life thrive under subzero conditions. Few natural history writers fail to warn that global warming threatens a mass extinction in these waters, and Riley too sounds the alarm. Saving “extremophiles” for later pages, he delivers vivid descriptions of spectacularly normal or amazingly grotesque creatures that live in boiling hot springs, poisonous mine wastes, the stratosphere, deep inside the earth’s crust, or miles down at the bottom of the ocean. It turns out that life itself may have originally been an extremophile that appeared almost four billion years ago on a planet without oxygen and survived on heat and toxic chemicals generated deep in the ocean as the earth’s tectonic plates pulled apart, freeing superheated magma below to mix with seawater above.

Expert evidence that life is not merely resilient, but spectacularly so.