"There are few better guides to the glories of s than Callum Roberts. Reef Life is a vibrant memoir of the joys, as well as the grind, of a research career beginning in the 1980s that has spanned a golden age of coral reef science. It is also a fine introduction to the ecology of reefs and the existential threats they now face. Roberts is well equipped for the task. He is chief scientific adviser to ', and has given us two of the best books in the last 15 years about the ecology of the sea and its fate in human hands: An Unnatural History of the Sea and Ocean of Life. Roberts revels in the details of life on a coral reef."