Published in collaboration with the University of Bergen and the Institute of Marine Research, Norway, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Coastal Plankton – Photoguide for European Seas
Otto Larink & Wilfried Westheide
München: Verlag Dr Friedrich Pfeil
144 pp., Price: €30. ISBN 3-89937-062-7
Coastal plankton includes a truly fascinating diversity of unicellular and multicellular organisms, which can be quite overwhelming for new students in marine biology. During their active time at German universities, Otto Larink and Wilfried Westheide taught field courses every year for a period of about 40 years. Most of the time, these courses were held at the Island of Helgoland in the North Sea, but occasionally they took place at other laboratories along the western European coast from Sweden in the north to Italy in the south. They always brought along a good microscope equipped with a camera and they took photographs of the different organisms they came across. After all these years, the authors decided to publish many of them in this photoguide of marine plankton.
The introduction of the book gives a nice overview of the different groups of organisms found in coastal plankton, including phototrophic algae, heterotrophic protists, metazoan holoplankton and meroplankton, including fish larvae. The book also briefly introduces the interaction between the different planktonic organisms and provides instructions on how to collect and process plankton samples for microscopy. The book is not a textbook, nor is it a comprehensive taxonomical key that allows the identification of organisms at the specific level. Rather, the book provides photographs of a great variety of plankton organisms that can be encountered in coastal waters, together with a short text on each of the depicted organisms. The photographs are generally of a high standard, and in some cases they are, in fact, exceptionally beautiful. The real strength of the book is that it presents the organisms as they actually look in the microscope without using different, often complicated, preparation techniques used by expert taxonomists. The book is slightly biased towards invertebrate larvae, probably due to the scientific interest of the authors, but this is easily forgivable, because the photographs of some of them are extremely nice.
As an introduction to marine plankton, this book is valuable to all marine laboratories teaching field courses on plankton biology and diversity in temperate waters. This book definitely deserves a place in every “field library”, along with classic works of Fraser, Newell and Newell, and Thorson.
Notes
Published in collaboration with the University of Bergen and the Institute of Marine Research, Norway, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, University of Copenhagen, Denmark