Events What Started in the Flow Tank Beneath Pratt Gym: Lessons from Corals and Jellyfish

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Amherst students and alumni joined to hear What Started in the Flow Tank Beneath Pratt Gym: Lessons from Corals and Jellyfish, an event presented by Juli Berwald Ph.D. ’89. She shared how her time at Amherst launched a lifelong love of the oceans and provided reflections, thoughts, and insights from her two recent books, Spineless, about jellyfish, and Life on the Rocks, about corals.

Juli was a math major who discovered a love of the sea during a junior year study abroad program. Hoping to study coral, she set up mildly successful experiments in a long-defunct flow tank under the Pratt gym floor. She eventually earned a doctorate, studying satellite imagery of the ocean and then became a math and science textbook writer in landlocked Austin, Texas. The jellyfish brought her back to the sea, and she published a science/memoir Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone. Her next book, Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She has also written for the New York Times, National Geographic, Science, Nature, and the Smithsonian. Juli has recently founded a non-profit, Amigos de los Corales de Tela, to study an unusually healthy coral reef in Honduras.

View recording: https://www.amherst.edu/mm/730022