When an out-of-work anthropologist’s toxically masculine, aquarist father falls ill with breast cancer, the son must take care of his father by covering his work at the Detroit Zoo. In doing so, he learns to care for his father’s best friends, the amphibians in his exhibit.

A group of nine explorers volunteer to survey extreme planets, but they are disharmonious because one of their members is a prickly empath. On their journey, they encounter a planet where the only living things seem to be the plants...until the empath is attacked, and they start to wonder if there is other life on the planet.