Marine Life Books

I grew up on the Texas Gulf coast and spent a lot of time beachcombing. This book pulls together fascinating "lifestyle" information about dozens of creatures I've always wondered about. Very readable Q and A format.

The left page of each two page spread has very simple text that still includes scientific information. There is also a label for each watercolor illustration on the right page. This is almost a book within a book. The afterword show a small black and white of each illustration and an additional paragraph of more detailed information. Karen Woodworth-Roman, Children's Science Book Review

I bought this book for my (almost) second-grade daughter. I received the book yesterday and she read it last night, and she really enjoyed it. The color plates are very well done, probably inspired from photographs. The text next to each plate is very short and easy, so my daughter liked it and thought it was easy. Then we got the the foreword part, where a lot more information is provided. The text there is in smaller font and single-spaced, and thus was a little intimidating, and she did not want to read it. Then I suggested playing a game, and she read the text for one plate and I read the next, and so on (we swaped on the last two, because the last one is much longer than others).
I am a malacologist (i.e., I study mollusks), and I applaud the authors for the great job they did not only with the beautiful plates but also on the research. The text in the foreword is well written, and although a few words were unfamiliar to my kid, they are a great introduction to the mollusks. I would strongly recommend this little book to your little ones as a nice introduction not only to mollusks but on marine biology. I will now have to buy other books in this series! The only suggestion I would make is to have a little more text near the plates, and make the font size a little larger in the foreword, so as not to discourage kids from reading.

THIS BOOK IS THE BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ ON DIVIN

"...the book is an up-to-date compilation of present knowledge in fish and invertabrate telemetry...I would recommend it to students, and researchers working on aquatic animals, as it will certainly be useful for further studies."

What, an *entire* book on copepods? Yes, and at a necessary length as well. The most abundant metazoan on the planet has now been given its proper due. This is a vital resource for not only plankton researchers, but should also have a close and easy spot on any marine ecologist's bookshelf. This is a true treatise of calanoid copepod biology including: systematics, anatomy, physiology, ecology and behavior. I can think of no other single source that is so useful to instructors and plankton researchers.

Oviedo University (Spain

My son in 2nd grade will read other books because he has to, but this book I have to tell him to put it down. He doesn't want to stop reading it. A real BIG PLUS in my opinion, a kid that doesn't want to stop reading... I want more!!

Ann McGovern came to my school and I chose this book because I like sharks. I am 8 years old and I like sharks. She tells very good stories.This book makes me want to learn more about sharks. She also signed my book.

Although this book is a detailed survey and synthesis of air-breathing fishes, it is clearly written, and provides introductory background information on the subject. As is pointed out several times, while air-breathing fishes are often considered as the fishes which evolved the ability to breathe in the air, and then invaded the land to evolve into the land vertebrates, this is not entirely correct. The fish lung evolved in the ancestor to both the ray-finned fishes and the lobe-finned fishes, many millions of years prior to transition to land. In the Upper Devonian one of many different fishes with lungs, a group belonging the lobe-finned fishes, became amphibious and eventually evolved into the tetrapods. While the fish lung was conserved and exists in the modern lungfish, in the bulk of fishes, such as modern teleosts, the fish lung evolved into a non-respiratory gas bladder, used largely for buoyancy control. Nonetheless, for more than three hundred different species of modern freshwater, shallow fishes, air breathing is a valuable mechanism to cope with hypoxic water conditions, and was conserved or re-evolved.