STEM Tuesday

Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview, a repeating feature for the last Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math!

Today we’re featuring Danna Staaf, a marine biologist and author of several science books. Her book The Lady and the Octopus: How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology garnered these reviews:

• Notable Award Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year, 2023
• Booklist Top 10 History for Youth, 2023
• Booklist Top 10 Science and Technology Books for Youth, 2023
• Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) Choices, 2023
• Booklist Top 10 Biographies & Memoirs for Youth, 2023
• School Library Journal Best Book of 2022

Andi Diehn: I love your sidebar in the first few pages about historic accuracy and doing our best with what we know until we can add to that knowledge. Why include this?

Danna Staaf: Honesty really is the best policy, especially when talking to children. Both the historical and the scientific record are intrinsically incomplete—there are open questions, missing data points, ambiguous findings. I felt it was very important to acknowledge that uncertainty up front, and not to pretend that I had all the answers. At the same time, I spent years researching this book, and I did have a lot of information, which gave me the ability to make guesses in good faith about missing pieces. This is how we build a trusting relationship with readers, by saying, “I don’t know everything. I’ll tell you what I do know, and how I know it. When I have to make guesses, I’ll tell you why those guesses are reasonable. And I’ll admit that they might turn out to be wrong later.”

I think about all the dinosaur books I read when I was a little kid, and the old misinterpretations of what dinosaurs looked like and how they lived. Most of those authors were doing the best they could with the available research—and they inspired the next generation of scientists to go out and do more research, to show which guesses were right and which were wrong. That’s the iterative nature of knowledge. It’s beautiful.

AD: I like how you made it clear that Jeanne was able to study and practice science because of her privileged position as a married woman with no children – why is this important for readers to be aware of?

DS: It’s a really interesting topic! When I first began to read about Jeanne, I thought her story would be strongly impacted by sexism, both during and after her life. And she absolutely did have to contend with sexism. A man who wasn’t even a scientist tried to take credit for her work, and although she managed to join several scientific societies as their first female member, the Royal Society (the UK’s national science academy) refused to admit women until 1945! Sexism likely also played a role in how quickly her work was forgotten after her death. However, as I read more of her writing and her peers’ writing about her, I became very impressed by how successfully she advocated for herself. Now I think that the reason we know as much about her as we do, and indeed the reason I had enough material to write this book, was her own determination to publish her research and get credit for it.

But Jeanne’s ability to research and advocate effectively was greatly enhanced by her privilege. In addition to being married and childless, she was white and wealthy. Before her marriage, she struggled to support herself and couldn’t devote time to natural history, but afterward, she had the resources and the leisure to pursue her curiosity. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had that freedom? How many more wonderful discoveries and inventions could be made? I hope it helps readers think about who has been left out of history, and why, and what we can do to create a more just society.

AD: I love your phrase on page 43 about studying “marine life instead of marine death” – why does this distinction matter?

DS: I actually think about it even more now than I did while I was writing this book! When Jeanne started working in natural history, especially in the field we now call marine biology, most people were very focused on studying dead specimens. They killed and dissected animals; they preserved skeletons and furs and shells. Even setting aside the ethics of doing science like that, they missed so much by not looking at living animals. Especially in the ocean, an animal can look completely different when it’s alive in its natural habitat—think of a jellyfish swimming gracefully through the water, which dissolves into goo if you kill it and try to preserve it. And behavior! The only way to really see how animals move, hunt, court, mate, and so forth is to observe it.

Science has come a long way from the days of pickling and dissecting everything in order to study it, in large part thanks to people like Jeanne and inventions like her aquariums. And yet there are still some stubborn remnants of this attitude. To describe a new species, it’s generally accepted that a dead specimen needs to be put in a museum somewhere. Now, I don’t want to discount the importance of museum collections in any way—those historical specimens are absolutely vital to our understanding of life, and even to the conservation and protection of living organisms, because scientists use the knowledge from those specimens to figure out things like which species are left in a coral reef or a rain forest, and how many are new to science. But now that we have high-resolution video capabilities, 3D scans, CT scans, and so forth, maybe we can shift toward identifying species without needing to kill individuals so often.

AD: She’s a scientist but also an inventor – how does scientific inquiry and invention go hand in hand?

DS: Scientists are always inventing gadgets to help them figure out the answers to their questions, from high-tech to low-tech and everything in between. When I was in graduate school studying squid, I wanted to know how temperature affected the development of squid eggs, so I worked with a really skilled technician to design a little incubator that could keep dishes of seawater at a range of different temperatures. It had a bunch of carefully machined metal pieces, all very precise. Then I took it on a research boat in Mexico in very hot weather, and I had to improvise a combination of bubble wrap and a desk fan to keep the whole assembly from overheating! Then, I also learned how to write computer programs to analyze the data I gathered. I’d say those are both forms of invention. Sometimes scientists’ inventions are very specific to a particular need, like my incubator, and sometimes they find more general applications, like Jeanne’s aquariums. You never know!

AD: What was your favorite thing you learned from your research?

DS: How can I pick just one?? I learned that that the tides in the Mediterranean Sea are more impacted by the local geography than by the moon, so when it’s high tide on one side of the Strait of Messina, it’s low tide on the other side, just a few kilometers away. I learned that an engineer named Charles Condert developed a type of scuba gear a hundred years ahead of Cousteau’s Aqua-Lung, and made many successful dives before dying in a tragic underwater accident–the first known scuba fatality. I learned that Benjamin Franklin carried around a little container of oil in his walking stick, so he could impress people by pouring it on rough water and calming the waves. But, if I have to pick, I think my favorite research gem was learning about Anna Thynne. She’d studied geology for years, and fell in love with corals because she saw them as living rocks. I love her account of collecting corals, which I didn’t have room to include in the book: “With a needle and thread I fixed the Madrepores [corals] on a large sponge, that there might be no damage from collision, and then placed them in a glass jar filled to the brim with water, and tied down with a bladder….During the journey [home from the seashore], I had the great pleasure of seeing them expand their tentacula most happily; and they arrived both at Clifton and London in a most flourishing state.”

AD: What did you like best about writing a biography? Was there anything frustrating about the project?

DS: I have to confess that history was my least favorite subject in school. I struggled to memorize the names and dates of monarchs and battles, while I had no trouble memorizing octopus species. So the historical research for this book was the biggest challenge for me. I had to read the timeline of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars over and over again to make sure I was getting everything right.

That said, it might also be the thing I liked best. I found that world events became much more interesting to me when I could link them with Jeanne’s life. Writing a biography actually kindled my interest in history, and helped me see how seemingly abstract monarch names and battle dates affected real people’s lives, even impacting the course of science. Now I can remember that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, because it led directly to Jeanne sewing a royal wedding gown in 1816, which led in turn to her meeting her future husband, and the beginning of her career in marine biology!

Danna Staaf is a science communicator and marine biologist who earned a PhD from Stanford University with her studies of baby squid. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, Nautilus, Atlas Obscura, and Science, and she is the author of Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods (named one of Science Friday’s best science books of the year), The Lady and the Octopus: How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology (a best book of the year of the School Library Journal and the Children’s Book Committee), and Nursery Earth: The Wondrous Lives of Baby Animals and the Extraordinary Ways They Shape Our World (hailed as “a gobsmacking delight!”). Her newest book is The Lives of Octopuses and their Relatives: A Natural History of Cephalopods. Staaf lives in San Jose, California, with her husband, children, cat, and innumerable plush octopuses.

Andi Diehn works as an editor for Nomad Press and has written many STEM books for kids!