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STEM Tuesday– Naturalists– Author Interview: Danna Staaf

By on April 22, 2025   /   Author Interviews, Earth Day, 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

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

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STEM Tuesday– Naturalists– Writing Tips & Resources

By on April 15, 2025   /   Earth Day, STEM Tuesday  

Hello again, STEM Tuesday friends. Here in Utah the spring has been iffy, with bitter winds and snow as recently as two weeks ago. Now that the air is warm and filled with little white blossoms from the cherry trees, it seems like we’re finally close to summer.

With the warming weather, and our monthly theme of naturalists, my first impulse is to recommend a nature walk. When I was young, I loved looking at different leaf shapes, and feeling their various textures. I remember washing out an Altoids tin and keeping an assortment of dried flowers, twigs, and rocks. These sorts of outings are timeless.

It being poetry month, I have a wonderful resource for you: a book about writing nature poems, written for and featuring young poets called A Crow Doesn’t Need a Shadow: A Guide to Writing Poetry From Nature by Lorraine Ferra.

a book cover

Indeed, the first chapter is about poetry field trips; getting into the great outdoors and experiencing the primary text of the world around us. Ferra writes,

Weather is an endless source of ideas for poems. You need only to step outside to feel the freshness of new-fallen snow, or a light rainfall. If circumstances limit your activities and keep you indoors, a poetry field trip can be as quick as a few steps to a window. From there, you can watch dark thunderclouds riding toward you like a herd of buffalo or catch sight of a rainbow before it disappears.”

While this book offers plenty of writing prompts, I’ll let you discover those yourselves (see page 21), instead opting to share some from my own arsenal.

Writing Prompt 1 | A Form Poem

Have your children try writing a seven-line diamante. It’s a little like a Mad Lib, in that they’ll need to know their parts of speech. Typically, diamante poems juxtapose two things—whether like or unlike—so the prompt is to choose two parts of nature and bookend the poem with those, like this:

seed

– –

– – –

– – – –

– – –

– –

pebble

From there, build the poem accordingly. The seven words following your first line should modify the beginning word. The seven words preceding the last line should modify the last word. Each hyphen represents a word. The double hyphen lines are filled with adjectives. The triple hyphen lines are filled with gerunds (verbs ending with -ing), and the middle line features nouns. A completed poem might look like this:

 

seed

patient, thirsty

uncurling, stretching, waving

stem, blossom, path, river

flying, twirling, sinking

kicked, settled

pebble

 

Writing Prompt 2 | Short Stories About Small Creatures

If going outside for a nature walk isn’t possible, the next best thing is bringing the outdoors in. If you feel adventurous, invite students to bring their own insects, bugs, or spiders to class (in a jar or other container). Otherwise, choose one or two to bring. Easy ones to capture might include pill bugs, common house flies, or pollinators like ladybugs. In a pinch, you can purchase some from pet stores, which usually carry live crickets (about $7 for 40), worms, and other small creatures. Several years ago, I caught a jumping spider similar to this guy in my back yard:

jumping spider

Encourage your students to write a short story from the perspective of one of these small creatures. What would the world look like? How could a normal object from school life, like a pencil or calculator, be experienced by a non-human? What kind of challenges might this kind of main character face? For example, what color of acrylic paint would a ladybug be most attracted to, or how many ants would it take to carry a cookie? This exercise may lead students to write silly stories, but it’s a fun prompt that encourages empathy.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying nature and the weather, helping your budding naturalists-in-the-making to observe and discover more about the world around them.

Best,

Stephanie

A nature-loving creative, Stephanie Jackson writes poems, articles, picture books, middle-grade novels, and more. Her nonfiction has been published in Cricket magazine and her poems have been published in The Dirigible Balloon and various literary journals including Touchstones, where she’s been a contributing poetry editor. Professional affiliations include the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and The Authors Guild. She’s graduating this month from Utah Valley University with her English degree, emphasis in creative writing. You can read more at StephanieWritesforKids.com.

 

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It’s Raining Books! New April Releases!

By on April 2, 2025   /   New Releases  

Great Spring time books are raining down on middle grade readers this month. Check out this selection of upcoming releases. From a debut historical fiction story from Laurie Halse Anderson to, a second in a series from Spice Girl Geri Halliwell-Horner, and several adventures await! Come in from the rain and read!

Rebellion 1776, Written by Laurie Halse Anderson, Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, April 1, 416 pgs

From New York Times bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson comes an eerily timely historical fiction middle grade adventure about a girl struggling to survive amid a smallpox epidemic, the public’s fear of inoculation, and the seething Revolutionary War.

In the spring of 1776, thirteen-year-old Elspeth Culpepper wakes to the sound of cannons. It’s the Siege of Boston, the Patriots’ massive drive to push the Loyalists out that turns the city into a chaotic war zone. Elspeth’s father—her only living relative—has gone missing, leaving her alone and adrift in a broken town while desperately seeking employment to avoid the orphanage.

Just when things couldn’t feel worse, the smallpox epidemic sweeps across Boston. Now, Bostonians must fight for their lives against an invisible enemy in addition to the visible one. While a treatment is being frantically fine-tuned, thousands of people rush in from the countryside begging for inoculation. At the same time, others refuse protection, for the treatment is crude at best and at times more dangerous than the disease itself.

Elspeth, who had smallpox as a small child and is now immune, finds work taking care a large, wealthy family with discord of their own, as they await a turn at inoculation, but as the epidemic and the revolution rage on, will she find her father?

Rosie Frost: Ice on Fire, written by Geri Halliwell-Horner, Philomel Books, April 8, 464 pgs.

The second sweeping adventure by iconic Spice Girl, songwriter, and New York Times bestselling author, Geri Halliwell-Horner.

On the brink of discovering who—or what—lies behind her mother’s death, Rosie Frost begins a new adventure with a murder to solve, revenge on her mind, and more questions than she has answers.

It’s a new term at Heverbridge School, and Bloodstone Island is in turmoil: mutant animals are on the loose, jealous classmates want to bring Rosie down, and, even worse, there’s a black hole to deal with. Below the island’s surface, an everlasting star is growing in strength, and it just may end them all.

Rosie discovers the north side of the island, home to the alluring Imperium Palace. But is the palace one of scientific genius or deadly menace?

While she fights to know the truth about her past—and her family’s ancient ties to Bloodstone—Rosie begins to wonder if the price for the truth may be too high. She must discover what she’s really made of as a fresh danger puts her new home—and all that she loves—at risk.

The Trouble with Secrets, written by Naomi Miller, Quill Tree Books, April 8, 336 pgs.

A Jewish girl preparing for her upcoming bat mitzvah tries to keep a secret—along with one of her sister’s—in this beautiful coming-of-age contemporary novel that explores change, grief, and the complexities of sibling relationships.

Twelve-year-old Becky has great expectations placed upon her. Not only does she need to be as perfect as her older brother and sister, but her upcoming bat mitzvah needs to be perfect, too. She is the rabbi’s daughter, after all. The trouble is, Becky’s intentions often lead her astray. At least when she plays the flute, she feels like the best version of herself. Until playing the flute causes Becky to do something not so perfect: keep a secret from her parents.

Then Becky discovers that Sara, her “perfect” sister, has an even bigger secret. One that could turn the family upside down. The sisters couldn’t be more ready to keep each other’s secret safe…until the excitement turns to guilt, and Becky is forced to make an impossible choice.

When secrets are shared and choices are made, doing the right thing can feel so wrong. And Becky will learn that actions, no matter how well intended, always have consequences.

Survive This Safari, written by Natalie D. Richards, Delacorte Press, April 8, 384 pgs.

You’re invited to the wildest ride of the year! An exciting novel featuring a group of kids competing in a giant safari park challenge, this book is packed with animal facts, puzzles and more making it the perfect book for readers looking for their next adventure.

Twelve-year old Lucy can’t believe her luck when she is selected for the Wildlands Safari Escape Challenge, which involves solving a series of mind-bending puzzles to unlock access to new animal habitats across the local safari park. Her team will be racing the Wildlands Ambassadors, a group of student animal experts. And if they win, wildlife-loving Lucy will get the chance to be an Ambassador herself!

But this challenge is trickier than Lucy expects—her team is in for a wild ride! Broken locks, downed electronics, and empty animal enclosures are just the start. Lucy discovers something truly terrifying: Wildlands’ beloved baby elephant is on the loose and might be in danger! The team is sure this can’t be part of the competition—and with their walkie-talkie on the fritz, they have no way to call for help.

Their fun puzzle has turned into a serious test, but Lucy and her team will surprise everyone with how they tackle the real Wildlands challenge.

Family Week, written by Sarah Moon, Knopf Books for Young Readers, April 15, 208 pgs.

Four best friends spend Family Week together at an annual gathering of LGBTQ+ families in Provincetown, MA—the largest of its kind across the world—in this middle grade coming-of-age story that celebrates identity, acceptance, and found family.

For as long as they can remember, Mac, Lina, Milo and Avery have celebrated Family Week together in “the smallest, gayest town in the world”—Provincetown, Massachusetts.

But this summer, their big rented beach house feels different. Avery’s dads are splitting up, and her life feels like it’s falling apart. Milo’s flunked seventh grade, which means everyone is moving on to bigger and better things except for him. Mac’s on his way to a progressive boarding school that lets transgender kids like him play soccer, but it means leaving his twin sister, Lina, and his moms—and the safety of home—behind.

Everything is changing, and for Lina, it feels like it’s happening with or without her. Avery, Milo, and Mac know this is going to be their last summer together. But Lina can’t accept that—and if she can make this the best summer ever, maybe she’ll convince them that there will be a Family Week next year. Good things might not last in the real world, but they do in P-town…. Right?

The Night We Got Stuck in a Story, written by Ben Miller, Aladdin, April 22, 288 pgs.

Lana must rescue her brother from an evil queen in this sequel to the illustrated middle grade fantasy adventure The Day I Fell into a Fairy Tale from actor, author, and comedian Ben Miller—perfect for fans of Half Upon a Time and Land of Stories!

When Lana and Harrison stay with their grandparents, one of their favorite places to play is a large hollow tree that made their adventures feel magical long before they were first transported into a fairy tale. But during their latest visit, the two discover the tree is set to be demolished.

That night, a magical golden thread leads them up through the hollow of the tree into a storybook land, where wind and rain rage and a fearsome beast terrifies all who live there. The siblings try to help, but things only get worse when Harrison gets kidnapped by the evil queen.

Now, Lana must do whatever it takes to find him, save the villagers, and restore the balance of the storybook world in order to save their beloved landmark.

The Trouble with Heroes, written by Kate Messner, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, April 29, 368 pgs

Bestselling and award-winning author Kate Messner takes readers on a heart-filling journey as a boy finds his path to healing.

One summer.46 mountain peaks.

A second chance to make things right.

Finn Connelly is nothing like his dad, a star athlete and firefighter hero who always ran toward danger until he died two years ago. Finn is about to fail seventh grade and has never made headlines . . . until now.

Caught on camera vandalizing a cemetery, he’s in big trouble for knocking down some dead old lady’s headstone. Turns out that grave belongs to a legendary local mountain climber, and her daughter makes Finn an unusual offer: she’ll drop all the charges if he agrees to climb all forty-six Adirondack High Peaks in a single summer. And there’s just one more thing—he has to bring along the dead woman’s dog.

In a wild three months of misadventures, mountain mud, and unexpected mentors, Finn begins to find his way on the trails. At the top of each peak, he can see for miles and slowly begins to understand more about himself and his dad. But the mountains don’t care about any of that, and as the clock ticks down to September, they have more surprises in store. Finn’s final summit challenge may be more than even a hero can face.

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