If you have ever visited a big-city aquarium, you may have marvelled at the luminescent jellyfish undulating in their blue-lit tanks like dreamlike cupcakes. Or perhaps you moved quickly to see more exciting creatures. Like, say, stingrays. Or sharks. Or anacondas. That would be a pity. Because you would have missed a chance to be enlightened.
Enlightenment is the through-line in Michel Anctil’s intelligent new book on the history and science of light production in living organisms. And I do mean enlightenment in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word. After all, what is science, if not a journey from the darkness into the light? An illumination of previously hidden phenomena. A probing of the mysteries of nature, through our specimens. It is exactly this sort of probing that Anctil writes about in Luminous Creatures, most radiantly.
Irina Kovalyova teaches molecular biology and biochemistry at Simon Fraser University. Her debut collection of short stories, Specimen, won the 2016 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in the literary fiction category.
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