Nautilus Book Awards Silver Award Winner, Animals & Nature Category, 2020

These stories take readers where they cannot go, be it out into space, back in time, deep under the ocean, down to microscopic scales, or out onto the geologic overview.

Squid turn themselves inside-out when disturbed by predators hunting through the darkness with sonar. Beneficial microbes spend their summer living in nectar and being transferred between blooms by the bees, then spend the winter living within those bees. Ecological stories are seen through the eyes of squirrels, birds, fish, ants, butterflies, and beetles.

Between the Rocks and the Stars dives deep into the relationships that shape the natural world. The book presents a collection of vignettes from the wild, each of which describes the natural advantage of a particular organism. These true-to-life accounts are then posed in particular circumstances that illustrate the principles—commensalism, speciation—that shape the place of these organisms in their living environment. Some stories cover topics in geology and cosmology, describing the physical world context in which natural history progresses across the eons.

Underlying themes in the book include the network of connections that link all these organisms together and the adaptations they make to the physical world in which they must find themselves a home.

In this sequel to the acclaimed Threads from the Web of Life, Stephen Daubert presents twenty-six new stories that pull the reader into the mystery and immediacy of ecological processes ranging from the microscopic to the tectonic. Many show surprising intersections of creatures from different realms or the hidden interplay of evolving organisms. These gripping stories contain a level of intimacy and detail not usually encountered in other styles of natural history writing.

Praise for the first collection of stories:

Stephen Daubert's Threads from the Web of Life is written in the tradition of Aldo Leopold and Bernd Heinrich. It teaches by drawing you into the drama, excitement, and beauty of nature.
--Don Glass, host of the NPR-syndicated program "A Moment of Science"

Threads from the Web of Life is a uniquely wide-ranging combination of scientific research and literary imagination that takes the reader on journeys through time and space that even the most elaborate television programs still can't provide. Stephen Daubert's grasp of a variety of botanical, zoological, geological, and climatological disciplines is impressive, and he presents them and their interactions with grace and authority.
--David Rains Wallace, author of The Klamath Knot, The Monkey's Bridge, and Beasts of Eden

Each of these happenings is a thread in the intricate web of life, and Daubert, a molecular scientist at the University of California, Davis, demonstrates that these threads are easily broken by humans. ... Instructive and entertaining.
--Publishers Weekly

Threads from the Web of Life takes readers on a journey around the globe as the author describes unique and unusual ecological processes. It is ideal for casual reading as well as a source of selections to read aloud (!) or to link literature with the study of natural history.
--NSTA Recommends, National Science Teachers Association

Highly recommended. ... The stories are as much enjoyable as they are informative.
--Science Books& Films
In these sixteen stories of the interplay of organisms, weather, and geophysics, many a being succumbs to predation, and many another endures. Evolution happens as species learn the hard way. There is often a tragic element in these fascinating tales. . . . These vivid, poetic tales . . . afford good teaching. Threads from the Web of Life will appeal to any reader whose heart is in the living world.
-- ForeWord

Ecology, like all literary narrative, has the potential for turnabout, surprise, lessons learned, and tragedy. The stories in Threads from the Web of Life and The Shark and the Jellyfish describe protagonists, their competitors, and the habitats that provide the setting for their interaction—habitats that have become surprisingly complex with the passage of evolutionary time.

One niche moves across a world of flowers that reaches its earliest peak bloom in the low valleys and then peaks later among the slopes of the foothills—a rolling habitat. Another hop-scotches across the ocean floor, compelling its occupants to migrate from the fallen body of one dead whale to the next. Yet another appears in the aftermath of typhoons, requiring its inhabitants to search the tropical coastline for the latest storm landfall.

These tales are filled with no less intrigue than other literary works, but they transpire out of the sight of most readers. Once known only to ecologists, in Threads from the Web of Life and The Shark and the Jellyfish, available for the first time in a single deluxe paperback, these stories become accessible to everyone with an interest in natural history.

A Selection of the Discovery Channel Book Club

In sixteen stories Steve Daubert pulls the reader into the mystery and immediacy of ecological processes spanning a range from microscopic to tectonic, from microscopic to cosmic forces. Each tale brings the reader into the moment to witness an episode of survival in the wild first-hand. The material is presented on a level of intimacy and detail not usually encountered in other styles of natural history writing.

These creative non-fiction stories provide not just a bird's eye view (though that's true for the owls, warblers, condors, and hummingbirds in the book), but a wasp's eye view, a mouse's, a sea turtle's, a squid's. Sometimes the focus is as small as the detritus on the forest floor, or a single beat of the wing of a gull. Other stories range across evolutionary time. From whales and dinosaurs to creatures invisible to the naked eye, author and illustrator bring to life the dynamic interplay of living, evolving creatures and the natural forces that have shaped their worlds.

The book includes chapter notes that document the scientific basis for each story and describe the controversies still surrounding some of them -- a splendid resource for families to read and share.