The Lerner Podcast

The Lady and the Octopus | Middle Grade Nonfiction from Danna Staaf

September 01, 2022 Season 1 Episode 67
The Lerner Podcast
The Lady and the Octopus | Middle Grade Nonfiction from Danna Staaf
Show Notes

Learn about the unexpected inventor of the aquarium, who studied and experimented on animals in the early 19th century. 

Jeanne Villepreux-Power was never expected to be a scientist. Born in 1794 in a French village more than 100 miles from the ocean, she pursued an improbable path that brought her to the island of Sicily. There, she took up natural history and solved the two-thousand-year-old mystery of how of the argonaut octopus gets its shell.

In an era when most research focused on dead specimens, Jeanne was determined to experiment on living animals. And to keep sea creatures alive for her studies, she had to invent a contraption to hold them—the aquarium. Her remarkable life story is told by author, marine biologist, and octopus enthusiast Danna Staaf.

Learn more about The Lady and the Octopus at LernerBooks.com.

Find Danna online at:
Danna's website
YouTube
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Music credits:
"Farm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/