The Natural History Of The Ocean

The Marine World is a book for everyone with an interest in the ocean, from the marine biologist or student wanting expert knowledge of a particular group to the naturalist or diver exploring the seashore and beyond. With colour illustrations, line drawings, more than 1,500 colour photographs, and with clear accessible text, this book encompasses all those organisms that live in, on and around the ocean, bringing together in a single text everything from the minuscule to the immense. It includes sections on all but the most obscure marine groups, covering invertebrate phyla from sponges to sea squirts, as well as plants, fungi, bacteria, fish, reptiles, mammals and birds. It incorporates information on identification, distribution, structure, biology, ecology, classification and conservation of each group, addressing the questions of ‘what?’, ‘where?’ and ‘how?’. Today global warming, overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are just a few of the ever increasing number of threats and challenges faced by ocean life. Without knowledge of the animals, plants and other organisms that live in the marine world, we cannot hope to support or implement successful conservation and management measures, nor truly appreciate the incredible wealth and variety of marine life. The Marine World is the product of a lifetime spent by Frances Dipper happily observing and studying marine organisms the world over. It has been brought to colourful life by a myriad of enthusiastic underwater photographers and by Marc Dando, the renowned natural history illustrator.

Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses, Helen M. Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time. Our ancient connections with the sea have developed and multiplied through industrialization and globalization, a trajectory that runs counter to Western depictions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human influence. Rozwadowski argues that knowledge about the oceans—created through work and play, scientific investigation, and also through human ambitions for profiting from the sea—has played a central role in defining our relationship with this vast, trackless, and opaque place. It has helped us to exploit marine resources, control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to refashion the sea into a more tractable arena for human activity. But while deepening knowledge of the ocean has animated and strengthened connections between people and the world’s seas, to understand this history we must address questions of how, by whom, and why knowledge of the ocean was created and used—and how we create and use this knowledge today. Only then can we can forge a healthier relationship with our future sea.

A fun and informative introduction to life in the world’s oceans, packed with fascinating facts, puzzles, games, and 100 reusable stickers Written and designed for younger readers, this book contains stickers of fish, mammals, amphibians, and invertebrates, from the great white shark to the tiny seahorse. The stickers are accompanied by fun learning pages on the behavior and habitats of the different animals, which explain what they look like, where they live, how they move, and what they eat. There are also some exciting puzzles and games, including a spot-the-difference puzzle, and readers can create their own underwater scene by adding stickers to a colorful double-page landscape spread. Perfect for kids who want to know more about the amazing array of creatures that live underwater, the book is fully checked and approved by the department of zoology at the Natural History Museum, London.

Although Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the “best book ever written about nature,” and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael’s sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville’s novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow’s nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab’s and Ishmael’s worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville’s narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab’s Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep—from whale hunters to climate refugees.

“The Southern Ocean is a wild and elusive place, an ocean like no other. With its waters lying between the Antarctic continent and the southern coastlines of Australia, New Zealand, South America, and South Africa, it is the most remote and inaccessible part of the planetary ocean, the only part that flows around Earth unimpeded by any landmass. It is notorious amongst sailors for its tempestuous winds and hazardous fog and ice. Yet it is a difficult ocean to pin down. Its southern boundary, defined by the icy continent of Antarctica, is constantly moving in a seasonal dance of freeze and thaw. To the north, its waters meet and mingle with those of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans along a fluid boundary that defies the neat lines of a cartographer.” So begins Joy McCann’s Wild Sea, the remarkable story of the world’s remote Southern, or Antarctic, Ocean. Unlike the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans with their long maritime histories, little is known about the Southern Ocean. This book takes readers beyond the familiar heroic narratives of polar exploration to explore the nature of this stormy circumpolar ocean and its place in Western and Indigenous histories. Drawing from a vast archive of charts and maps, sea captains’ journals, whalers’ log books, missionaries’ correspondence, voyagers’ letters, scientific reports, stories, myths, and her own experiences, McCann embarks on a voyage of discovery across its surfaces and into its depths, revealing its distinctive physical and biological processes as well as the people, species, events, and ideas that have shaped our perceptions of it. The result is both a global story of changing scientific knowledge about oceans and their vulnerability to human actions and a local one, showing how the Southern Ocean has defined and sustained southern environments and people over time. Beautifully and powerfully written, Wild Sea will raise a broader awareness and appreciation of the natural and cultural history of this little-known ocean and its emerging importance as a barometer of planetary climate change.

“Excellent . . . Those who are interested in vertebrate paleontology or in the scientific history of the American midwest should really get a copy.” —PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology Revised, updated, and expanded with the latest interpretations and fossil discoveries, the second edition of Oceans of Kansas adds new twists to the fascinating story of the vast inland sea that engulfed central North America during the Age of Dinosaurs. Giant sharks, marine reptiles called mosasaurs, pteranodons, and birds with teeth all flourished in and around these shallow waters. Their abundant and well-preserved remains were sources of great excitement in the scientific community when first discovered in the 1860s and continue to yield exciting discoveries 150 years later. Michael J. Everhart vividly captures the history of these startling finds over the decades and re-creates in unforgettable detail these animals from our distant past and the world in which they lived—above, within, and on the shores of America’s ancient inland sea. “Oceans of Kansas remains the best and only book of its type currently available. Everhart’s treatment of extinct marine reptiles synthesizes source materials far more readably than any other recent, nontechnical book-length study of the subject.” —Copeia “[The book] will be most useful to fossil collectors working in the local region and to historians of vertebrate paleontology . . . Recommended.” —Choice

QLD Premier's Book Awards -- Shortlisted Science Writer Award Awarded a 2010 Whitley Certificate of Commendation for Natural History The largest, swiftest, highest-leaping, fastest-growing and most migratory fishes on the planet all live in the open ocean. Beautifully adapted to their world, they range from tiny drift fish and slow plankton-straining whale sharks to high-energy, streamlined predators such as tuna and marlin. Fishes of the Open Ocean, from Julian Pepperell, one of Australia's best-known marine biologists and world authority on oceanic fishes, is the first book to describe these fishes and detail their biology and the complex, often fragile world in which they live. This unique guide covers all major species including tuna, marlin, swordfish and pelagic sharks, as well as lesser-known ones such as flying fish, lancetfish, sunfish, pomfret, opah, louvar, fanfish and basking sharks.

In The Empty Ocean, acclaimed author and artist Richard Ellis tells the story of our continued plunder of life in the sea and weighs the chances for its recovery. Through fascinating portraits of a wide array of creatures, he introduces us to the many forms of sea life that humans have fished, hunted, and collected over the centuries, from charismatic whales and dolphins to the lowly menhaden, from sea turtles to cod, tuna, and coral. Rich in history, anecdote, and surprising fact, Richard Ellis’s descriptions bring to life the natural history of the various species, the threats they face, and the losses they have suffered. Killing has occurred on a truly stunning scale, with extinction all too often the result, leaving a once-teeming ocean greatly depleted. But the author also finds instances of hope and resilience, of species that have begun to make remarkable comebacks when given the opportunity. Written with passion and grace, and illustrated with Richard Ellis’s own drawings, The Empty Ocean brings to a wide audience a compelling view of the damage we have caused to life in the sea and what we can do about it. "