Biology of sharks and their relatives, second edition
Edited by Jeffrey C. Carrier, John A. Musick and Michael R. Heithaus
Boca Raton, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012, 633 pp, ISBN 978-1-4398-3924-9, £63.99
This is the second edition of a very informative book on the general knowledge and recent advances in the biology of sharks, rays and chimeras, which was first published in 2004. The first edition has become a standard for shark researchers in many fields, and we have been expecting a second edition as it has been eight years since the first edition. This publication will be informative and indispensable to fish biologists, university students and aquarium staff. The editor is to be praised for the great job of integrating many contributions into a very useful publication.
This volume is organized into three sections. Section I, ‘Phylogeny and Zoogeography’, contains morphological, molecular-based hypotheses of the phylogenetic relationships, including both extinct and living chondrichthyans. In this section, Naylor and his research group provide many progressive hypotheses and questions on the monophyly of currently recognized taxa within the elasmobranchs. This is one of the most notable parts of this volume, and presents a new research agenda for the systematics of sharks and rays.
Section II entitled ‘Form, Function, and Physiological Process’ focuses on functional morphology and physiology. Every chapter from the former edition has been updated, and contains many recent research advances. Importantly, a new chapter dealing with the multisensor tagging techniques might be very useful for many researchers working on the assessment and conservation biology of sharks and rays. Furthermore, the authors introduce various applications of behavioural analysis of sharks and rays in captivity and in the field. I personally found Chapter 10, ‘Reproductive Biology of Elasmobranchs’, to be very useful. It has an increased number of colour pages with beautiful photographs and graphs. This chapter introduces many patterns of the reproductive mode of sharks, rays and chimeras, with detailed descriptions and good summaries of the mating behaviour of elasmobranch fishes. Chapter 11, ‘Hormonal Regulation of Elasmobranch Physiology’, is very advanced compared to the last edition. In the first edition, the contents of the general information on the hormonal regulation in sharks and rays were very limited and the figures were also insufficient for us to basically understand the endocrine system of elasmobranchs. However, in this edition, both the description and figures are much improved. Chapter 12, ‘Sensory Physiology and Behavior of Elasmobranchs’, is also comprehensive and helps us understand how the senses work together and how we should explain the patterns of behaviour in sharks and rays.
Section III, ‘Ecology and Life History’, integrates other research areas not covered in Sections I and II. Although it is an unavoidable problem for such a publication, I think this section lacks unity with the themes of the other chapters. However, each chapter in this section contains very informative, useful knowledge for experts. I expect that in the next edition, the editors will expand this section, reconstructing it as chapters on ‘Population Biology’ and ‘Genetics’. For the coming decade, genetic techniques might be applied to various experimental researches of sharks and rays, and a significant increase in experiments using next-generation sequences would be expected. As the trend of research varies with generations, I hope that the volume will continue to be revised in the future.
This book is no doubt the most up-to-date publication on chondrichthyan biology for specialists. However, I would like to request that the editors expand the chapters on the basic knowledge of chondrichthyan fishes; for example, the morphological descriptions to include external, skeletal, muscular, circulatory systems, giving ‘standards’ of the terms and their usages in biological communications. This improvement might expand the readership of this publication and make it more and more informative for future biologists. Also, it would be desirable that the book be updated every 10 years including the latest contributions on the sharks and rays of the world.
Keiichi Sato
Chief of Aquarium Education
Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium,
Motobu, Okinawa, Japan
E-mail: [email protected]
© 2013 Keiichi Sato