You have just got to love a colorful, large-format encyclopedia on sharks, and this is one of the best.
--American Reference Books Annual
An up-to-date encyclopedia of the world's most ancient predators.
The Encyclopedia of Sharks is a richly illustrated and fact-filled reference on all the world's species of sharks. The author debunks the fearful myths and fierce legends, providing straightforward facts and the latest research on sharks. More than 200 striking photographs show sharks in their natural habitats. Detailed drawings illustrate the anatomical features unique to sharks, such as their fearsome but short-lived teeth.
The book includes authoritative and updated information on:
- Evolution and design of the shark
- Classifications and orders
- Understanding the shark
- The life of the shark -- how it feeds, breeds and migrates
- Shark "supersense" -- how it survives in the aquatic environment
- The need for protection and conservation -- how sharks are now endangered by over fishing and "finning."
Also included is a 50-page comprehensive, all-color section featuring and explaining the world's most important breeds.
Through its lively text, spectacular photography, and charts, maps and illustrations, The Encyclopedia of Sharks will encourage an understanding of these complex creatures.
A charming deep dive into the hidden world of seaweed, filled with fascinating facts and beautiful illustrations of the most sensuous family of water plants.
Seaweed is so familiar, and yet we know so little about it. Even its names--pepper dulse, sea lettuce, bladderwrack--are mystifying.
In this exquisitely illustrated portrait, poet and artist Miek Zwamborn shares discoveries of seaweed's history, culture, and science. We encounter its medicinal and gastronomic properties and long history of human use, from the Neolithic people of the Orkney islands to sushi artisans in modern Japan. We find seaweed troubling Columbus on his voyages across the Atlantic and intriguing Humboldt in the Sargasso Sea. We follow its inspiration for artists from Hokusai to Matisse, its collection by Victorians as pressed specimens in books, its adoption into fashion and dance, and its potential for combating climate change, as a sustainable food source and a means of reducing methane emissions in cattle.
And, of course, we learn how to eat seaweed, through a fabulous series of recipes based around these "truffles of the seas."
One of the most fascinating and amazing underwater photography ever. The author summarizes "I was 20 meters from the calf and his mother. He nuzzled her and then to my surprise swam straight towards me. I didn't take my eyes off him through my lens and snapped continuously as he came closer and closer. I dared to look over the top of my camera and there he was, just a few feet away looking me straight in the eye."
From one of the world's most renowned cave divers, a firsthand account of exploring the earth's final frontier: the hidden depths of our oceans and the sunken caves inside our planet
More people have died exploring underwater caves than climbing Mount Everest, and we know more about deep space than we do about the depths of our oceans. From one of the top cave divers working today--and one of the very few women in her field--Into the Planet blends science, adventure, and memoir to bring readers face-to-face with the terror and beauty of earth's remaining unknowns and the extremes of human capability.
Jill Heinerth--the first person in history to dive deep into an Antarctic iceberg and leader of a team that discovered the ancient watery remains of Mayan civilizations--has descended farther into the inner depths of our planet than any other woman. She takes us into the harrowing split-second decisions that determine whether a diver makes it back to safety, the prejudices that prevent women from pursuing careers underwater, and her endeavor to recover a fallen friend's body from the confines of a cave. But there's beauty beyond the danger of diving, and while Heinerth swims beneath our feet in the lifeblood of our planet, she works with biologists discovering new species, physicists tracking climate change, and hydrogeologists examining our finite freshwater reserves.
Written with hair-raising intensity, Into the Planet is the first book to deliver an intimate account of cave diving, transporting readers deep into inner space, where fear must be reconciled and a mission's success balances between knowing one's limits and pushing the envelope of human endurance.
Editors' Choice: The New York Times Book Review - Outside Magazine - National Book Review - Forbes In the tradition of Mountains Beyond Mountains and The Orchid Thief, Stronghold is Tucker Malarkey's eye-opening account of one of the world's greatest fly fishermen and his crusade to protect the world's last bastion of wild salmon. From a young age, Guido Rahr was a misfit among his family and classmates, preferring to spend his time in the natural world. When the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest began to decline, Guido was one of the few who understood why. As dams, industry, and climate change degraded the homes of these magnificent fish, Rahr saw that the salmon of the Pacific Rim were destined to go the way of their Atlantic brethren: near extinction. An improbable and inspiring story, Stronghold takes us on a wild adventure, from Oregon to Alaska to one of the world's last remaining salmon strongholds in the Russian Far East, a landscape of ecological richness and diversity that is rapidly being developed for oil, gas, minerals, and timber. Along the way, Rahr contends with scientists, conservationists, Russian oligarchs, corrupt officials, and unexpected allies in an attempt to secure a stronghold for the endangered salmon, an extraordinary keystone species whose demise would reverberate across the planet. Tucker Malarkey, who joins Rahr in the Russian wilderness, has written a clarion call for a sustainable future, a remarkable work of natural history, and a riveting account of a species whose future is closely linked to our own. Praise for Stronghold "This book isn't just about fish, it's about life itself and the fragile unseen threads that connect all creatures across this beleaguered orb we call home. Guido Rahr's quest to save the world's wild salmon should serve as an inspiration--and a provocation--for us all, and Tucker Malarkey's exquisite book captures Rahr's weird and wonderful story with poignancy, humor, and grace."--Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice and Blood and Thunder "A crazy-good, intensely lived book that reads like an international thriller--only it's our beloved salmon playing the part of diamonds or oil or gold."--David James Duncan, author of The River Why and The Brothers K
The first books the beginning naturalist needs. Simplified versions of the full-size guides, they make it easy to get started in the field.
From Susan Casey, the New York Times bestselling author of The Wave and The Devil's Teeth, a breathtaking journey through the extraordinary world of dolphins
Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness, sociability, and intelligence seem like an aquatic mirror of mankind. In recent decades, we have learned that dolphins recognize themselves in reflections, count, grieve, adorn themselves, feel despondent, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, infer, seduce, form cliques, throw tantrums, and call themselves by name. Scientists still don't completely understand their incredibly sophisticated navigation and communication abilities, or their immensely complicated brains.
While swimming off the coast of Maui, Susan Casey was surrounded by a pod of spinner dolphins. It was a profoundly transporting experience, and it inspired her to embark on a two-year global adventure to explore the nature of these remarkable beings and their complex relationship to humanity. Casey examines the career of the controversial John Lilly, the pioneer of modern dolphin studies whose work eventually led him down some very strange paths. She visits a community in Hawaii whose adherents believe dolphins are the key to spiritual enlightenment, travels to Ireland, where a dolphin named as "the world's most loyal animal" has delighted tourists and locals for decades with his friendly antics, and consults with the world's leading marine researchers, whose sense of wonder inspired by the dolphins they study increases the more they discover.
Yet there is a dark side to our relationship with dolphins. They are the stars of a global multibillion-dollar captivity industry, whose money has fueled a sinister and lucrative trade in which dolphins are captured violently, then shipped and kept in brutal conditions. Casey's investigation into this cruel underground takes her to the harrowing epicenter of the trade in the Solomon Islands, and to the Japanese town of Taiji, made famous by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, where she chronicles the annual slaughter and sale of dolphins in its narrow bay.
Casey ends her narrative on the island of Crete, where millennia-old frescoes and artwork document the great Minoan civilization, a culture which lived in harmony with dolphins, and whose example shows the way to a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world.
No writer is better positioned to portray these magical creatures than Susan Casey, whose combination of personal reporting, intense scientific research, and evocative prose made The Wave and The Devil's Teeth contemporary classics of writing about the sea. In Voices in the Ocean, she has written a thrilling book about the other intelligent life on the planet.
The true story of a miraculous encounter between a teenaged girl and a baby whale off the coast of California
It was the dark of early morning; seventeen-year-old Lynne Cox was swimming her last half mile back to the pier after a long workout when she became aware that something was swimming with her. The ocean was charged with energy as if a squall was moving in; whatever it was felt large enough to be a white shark coursing beneath her body. In fact, it was a baby gray whale. Lynne quickly realized that if she swam back to the pier, the young calf would follow her to shore and die from collapsed lungs. On the other hand, if Lynne didn't find the mother whale, the baby would suffer from dehydration and starve to death. Something so enormous--the mother whale would be at least fifty feet long--suddenly seemed very small in the vast Pacific Ocean. This is the story--part mystery, part magical tale--of what happened.
