Ocean Bestiary: Meeting Marine Life from Abalone to Orca to Zooplankton

Description

A delightful A-to-Z menagerie of the sea—whimsically illustrated, authoritative, and thought-provoking.   For millennia, we have taken to the waves. And yet, for humans, the ocean remains our planet’s most inaccessible region, the place about which we know the least. From A to Z, abalone to zooplankton, and through both text and original illustrations, Ocean Bestiary is a celebration of our ongoing quest to know the sea and its creatures.   Focusing on individual species or groups of animals, Richard J. King embarks upon a global tour of ocean wildlife, including beluga whales, flying fish, green turtles, mako sharks, noddies, right whales, sea cows (as well as sea lions, sea otters, and sea pickles), skipjack tuna, swordfish, tropicbirds, walrus, and yellow-bellied sea snakes. But more than this, King connects the natural history of ocean animals to the experiences of people out at sea and along the world’s coastlines. From firsthand accounts passed down by the earliest Polynesian navigators to observations from Wampanoag clamshell artists, African-American whalemen, Korean female divers (or haenyeo), and today’s pilots of deep-sea submersibles—and even to imaginary sea expeditions launched through poems, novels, and paintings—Ocean Bestiary weaves together a diverse array of human voices underrepresented in environmental history to tell the larger story of our relationship with the sea. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, but always compelling, King’s vignettes reveal both how our perceptions of the sea have changed for the better and how far we still have to go on our voyage. Contents Series Editors’ Foreword: Oceans in Depth Introduction World Map Abalone Architeuthis dux Beluga Chinstrap Penguin Dolphinfish Electric Ray Flying Fish Frigatebird Grampus Green Turtle Guanay Cormorant Halibut Horse Isurus oxyrinchus Juan Fernández Crawfish Killer Whale Louisiana Shrimp Mother Carey’s Chicken New Zealand Sea Lion Noddy Octopus Otter Paper Nautilus Parrot Pilot Fish Quahog Right Whale Sea Cow Sea Pickle Silver King Teredo Shipworm Tropicbird Tuna Urchin Velella and the Man-of-War Walrus Wandering Albatross Whale Shark Xiphias gladius Yellow-Bellied Sea Snake Zooplankton Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography Index