Acclaimed best-selling author, biologist, and ethologist Jonathan Balcombe (What a Fish Knows; Pleasurable Kingdom; Super Fly; Second Nature; and Jake and Ava: A Boy and a Fish) presenting from Ontario with a chat and Q&A.

Jonathan Balcombe was born in England and raised in Canada where he now lives. He has loved animals since age three when he decided he wanted to be a hippopotamus. Instead, he became a biologist with a PhD in the study of animal behavior. During a career focused on animal protection, he developed and taught courses in animal behavior and animal sentience for the Viridis Graduate Institute, and Humane Society University, and served as Associate Editor to the open-access journal Animal Sentience.

His main focus these days is researching and writing books, which include Pleasurable Kingdom, Second Nature, The Exultant Ark, and What a Fish Knows, a New York Times best-seller available in seventeen languages. His latest book for grown-ups, Super Fly, won the National Outdoor Book Award for natural history literature.

His first children’s book, Jake and Ava: A Boy and a Fish, was published in 2021. He is currently writing a book that explores cooperation and joy in the wild. In his spare time Jonathan enjoys biking, hiking, birding, baking, snorkeling, and trying to understand the neighborhood squirrels.What a Fish Knows. Arguably the least understood, and certainly the most exploited vertebrates on Earth, fishes have been mainly viewed by us in two contexts: as a source of food, and a source of recreation. It is as if they didn’t have lives of their own. Modern science shows otherwise.

This eye-opening presentation explores the colorful lives of the most diverse group of vertebrates. We explore fish perceptions, cognition, emotion, social behavior, and cooperation, all within the context of our evolving relationship to fishes and their vital aquatic habitats. And, because they are blowing our biases out of the water these days, octopuses will be part of the conversation, too.