Stephen R. Palumbi is a marine biologist and Director of the Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, and Anthony R. Palumbi, his son, is a science writer and novelist. Together they have written a popular book that describes adaptations of marine life to their environment – mainly emphasizing extreme conditions. The table of contents therefore reads like a Guinness Book of Records for marine life with headings like The Deepest, The Shallowest, The Coldest, The Hottest, The Fastest, and so on. The first couple of chapters, however, are devoted to a brief history of life over geological time and to ‘living fossils’ such as Nautilus, horseshoe crabs, and the coelacanth. The final chapter (Future Extremes) discusses anthropogenic threats to marine life including climate change, ocean acidification, eutrophication, and overfishing.
The main emphasis is on physiological adaptations; for example, surviving exposure to air and to wave battering of intertidal animals, the presence of antifreeze compounds in the body fluids of Antarctic icefish, how diving whales avoid the bends, adaptations in reproductive biology like parasitic dwarf males in deep-sea angler fish and synchronized spawning of the palolo worm. The chapters are informative and interesting and altogether well written. I felt a degree of irritation from some parts of the narrative describing, for example, how a scientist hunts for sea horses in some exotic place including a variety of other irrelevant details, but apparently those sorts of things are currently fashionable in popular science writing. I did, however, enjoy reading the book and did not find any serious factual errors. The book also includes several nice colour plates showing, among other things, photographs of life on coral reefs and in the deep sea, and a group of sailfish attacking a school of smaller fish.
The book has an additional commendable quality: it has an extensive reference list also to the original literature – this is regrettably an unusual feature in popular science writing. There are also references to relevant pages on the Internet. However, in the preface, as the authors point out, the Internet is often incomplete or inaccurate and they find it regrettable that public access to real scientific sources is so limited.
Tom Fenchel
Emeritus Professor
Marine Biological Laboratory, University of Copenhagen, Helsingør, Denmark
E-mail: [email protected]
© 2014 Tom Fenchel