Life Beyond Measure: Nature's Hidden Wonders at Every Scale

Experience life in all its dimensions

“Dazzling. A thrilling journey of discovery . . . from the profoundly weird to the awe-inspiring.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry

All around us, just beyond our awareness, life proceeds in astounding ways. A 100-ton blue whale swims easily across fathomless oceans, singing to whales thousands of miles away. Alongside it a bacterium pinballs through a drop of seawater that is as vast to it as an ocean is to the whale. Hummingbirds are too speedy for us to truly follow, while plants move too languorously for us to perceive.

Every living thing operates at its own scale—a blend of size, range, pace, longevity, and influence that defines the contours and rhythms of its life. We tend to think of the human scale as life’s default. But in Life Beyond Measure, Ed Yong coaxes us from our medium-sized, medium-lived, medium-paced, moderately mobile existence and introduces us to entirely new worlds. Fireflies synchronize their luminous chorus; a bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; an entire menagerie of bizarre animals lurks in the cavernous spaces between grains of sand; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean; an ant colony acts with a personality; a forest might well be a single tree; and a host of other dazzling, disorienting entities expand our understanding of what life can be.

Mind-bending, exhilarating, funny, and profound, Life Beyond Measure is a call to cast off our human perspective, lose ourselves in the vastness and strangeness of nature, and, by doing so, discover how intimately connected to the rest of life we are.