A Year with the Seals Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea's Most Charismatic and Controversial Creatures

by Morris, Alix; Montgomery, Sy

• ISBN13: 9781643755014
• ISBN10: 1643755013
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781643755045
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-07-15
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• More Book Details

Summary

A SCIENCE NEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“As soon as Alix Morris introduced me to a talking seal with a Boston accent, I was hooked. A Year with the Seals is full of colorful characters both human and aquatic. Once you start reading this intriguing book, you might have a hard time putting it down.”—Leigh Ann Henion, New York Times-bestselling author of Phenomenal and Night Magic

Environmental journalist Alix Morris spends an eye-opening year getting to know these elusive, intelligent creatures, investigating the effects of their extraordinary return from the brink of extinction and how we can try to bring nature back into balance.
 
It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.
 
Morris also gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fishermen whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers and swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters. A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences. But it’s also a gripping adventure story of a journalist determined to understand seals and our relationship with them for herself.

Author Biography

Alix Morris has graduate degrees in science writing from MIT and global health from Johns Hopkins, and has published in the Boston Globe Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Magazine, National Geographic, MIT Technology Review, and others. Her first book, A Year With the Seals, is supported by a grant from the Sloan Foundation.