Biology of Fishes, 3rd edition, by Quentin Bone & Richard H. More
Taylor & Francis Group, New York & Oxford, 2008, 478 pp., ISBN: 9780415375627, ISBN-10: 0415375622, £39.99 (pb)
This book of 14 chapters covers traditional fish biology including diversity, habitats, swimming, buoyancy, gas exchange and circulatory system, osmoregulation and ion balance, food and feeding, reproduction and life histories, endocrine systems, sensory system, nervous system, immune system, behaviour, fisheries and aquaculture. The chapter on the immune system is new to the 3rd edition, compared to the 2nd edition by Bone, Marshall & Blaxter (Citation1995). Both subject and systematic indexes are included, which makes it easy to navigate the comprehensive text. Illustrations are plentiful, mainly as drawings with a few photographs. Some readers may, however, find the fish drawings somewhat primitive and artistic rather than informative.
The book has a clear physiological approach and focuses on how fishes deal with the challenges of living in aquatic habitats. The systematic part provides a rough overview of the diversity of fishes, but this topic is clearly not the authors’ strongpoint. Spelling mistakes in scientific names are not uncommon, and incorrect names are sometimes used for higher categories. On page 236, for example, it is mentioned that the ophidioids are viviparous – this should have been the bythitoids. The number of fish species is claimed to be over 25,000 with around 100 new species described annually. There is no reason for not being accurate on this, however, since the correct numbers are about 30,000 and 400, respectively, as can easily be found from Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes: http://research.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/. Such mistakes could also have been avoided by consulting Nelson (Citation2006), cited on page 60.
Readers should not expect this book to be useful for management and conservation issues. The chapters on fisheries and aquaculture provide an overview, but no more than that. More references to the threatened status of some of the species would have made the book timelier. The story on page 28 about how a sturgeon was caught off the coast of the UK by a research vessel and then presented to the Queen for consumption is no longer amusing, as the species is now critically endangered (CITES) and may well become extinct before long.
As already mentioned, this book is primarily a text on fish physiology and as such it is ‘good value’. It provides a fine and updated overview and will be a very useful universal handbook for both students and experienced biologists.
Peter Rask Møller
Curator of Fishes, Associate Professor
Zoological Museum,
Natural History Museum of Denmark,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
E-mail: [email protected]
© 2009 Peter Rask Møller
References
- Bone Q , Marshall NB , Blaxter JHS . 1995 . Biology of Fishes , 2nd ed. . London : Chapman & Hall . 332 pages.
- Nelson JS. Fishes of the World . 4th ed. New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 624 pages.