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Books > Sport & Leisure > Natural history, country life & pets > Wild animals > Aquatic creatures > General
A captivating historical look at the cultural and artistic significance of shells in early modern Europe Among nature's most artful creations, shells have long inspired the curiosity and passion of artisans, artists, collectors, and thinkers. Conchophilia delves into the intimate relationship between shells and people, offering an unprecedented account of the early modern era, when the influx of exotic shells to Europe fueled their study and representation as never before. From elaborate nautilus cups and shell-encrusted grottoes to delicate miniatures, this richly illustrated book reveals how the love of shells intersected not only with the rise of natural history and global trade but also with philosophical inquiry, issues of race and gender, and the ascent of art-historical connoisseurship. Shells circulated at the nexus of commerce and intellectual pursuit, suggesting new ways of thinking about relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. The authors focus on northern Europe, where the interest and trade in shells had its greatest impact on the visual arts. They consider how shells were perceived as exotic objects, the role of shells in courtly collections, their place in still-life tableaus, and the connections between their forms and those of the human body. They examine how artists gilded, carved, etched, and inked shells to evoke the permeable boundary between art and nature. These interactions with shells shaped the ways that early modern individuals perceived their relation to the natural world, and their endeavors in art and the acquisition of knowledge. Spanning painting and print to architecture and the decorative arts, Conchophilia uncovers the fascinating ways that shells were circulated, depicted, collected, and valued during a time of remarkable global change.
Two-thirds of our planet lies out of sight of land, just offshore beyond the horizon. What wildlife might you find out there? And how might you identify what you see? This Offshore Sea Life ID Guide, designed for quick use on day trips off the West Coast, helps you put a name to what you see, from whales and dolphins to albatrosses, turtles, and even flyingfish. Carefully crafted color plates show species as they typically appear at sea, and expert text highlights identification features. This user-friendly field guide is essential for anyone going out on a whale-watching or birding trip, and provides a handy gateway to the wonders of the ocean. * First state-of-the-art pocket guide to offshore sea life* Over 300 photos used to create composite plates * Includes whales, dolphins, sea lions, birds, sharks, turtles, flyingfish, and more* Accessible and informative text reveals what to look for * Great for beginners and experts alike
A tale of obsession and very big fish from Jeremy Wade, the presenter of ITV's RIVER MONSTERS. Over ten feet long, it weighs in at nearly a quarter of a ton. Covering its back are armoured plates made of bone. Five hundred stiletto-sharp teeth line its long crocodilian jaws. It's a prehistoric beast of staggering proportions; a fearsome creature from the time of the dinosaurs. But the Alligator Gar, an air-breathing survivor from the Cretaceous period is still with us today, patrolling inland rivers, hunting in murky waters shared by human communities. And for Jeremy Wade, described as the 'greatest angling explorer of his generation', the Gar and other outlandish freshwater predators have been an obsession for all his adult life. With names like Arapaima, Snakehead, Goonch, Goliath Tigerfish and Electric Eel, many of them have acquired an almost mythical status. In a quest that has taken him from the Amazon to the Congo, and from North America to the mountains of India, Wade has pursued the truth about these little known, often misunderstood animals. Along the way he's survived a plane crash, malaria and a fish-inflicted blow to the chest that, according to a later scan, caused permanent scarring to his heart. In RIVER MONSTERS, Wade delivers a sometimes jaw-dropping blend of adventure, natural history, legend and detective work. It reads like a hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. But it's all true. These are fisherman's tales like you've never heard before. The stories of the ones that didn't get away ...
From editors David Joy and Eric Rickstad comes Gather at the River, an anthology of twenty-five remarkable essays on fishing from an ensemble of contemporary authors. Their experiences explore the ways we come to water, for renewal and reverie, or to simply stand waist-deep in a river and watch the trout rise. Gather at The River is more than a collection of big fish stories; it's Ron Rash writing about the Appalachia of his youth and C.J. Box revealing the river where he wants his ashes spread. It's Natalie Baszile on a frogging expedition in the Louisiana Bayou and a teenaged Jill McCorkle facing new realities of adulthood on Holden Beach, North Carolina. This is an anthology about friendship, family, love and loss, and everything in between, because as Henry David Thoreau wrote, "it is not really the fish they are after." The contributors are an eclectic mix of critically acclaimed writers including New York Times Bestselling Authors Ron Rash, Jill McCorkle, Leigh Ann Henion, Eric Rickstad, M.O. Walsh, and #1 Bestseller C.J. Box. Some of the proceeds of every sale will benefit C.A.S.T. for Kids, public charity that joins volunteers who love to fish with children who have special needs and disadvantages for a day of fishing in the outdoors.
"After five decades, twenty books, and countless columns, [John Gierach] is still a master," (Forbes) and his newest book only confirms this assessment, along with his recent induction into the Flyfishing Hall of Fame. In A Fly Rod of Your Own, Gierach brings his ever-sharp sense of humor and keen eye for observation to the fishing life and, for that matter, life in general. Known for his witty, trenchant observations about fly-fishing, Gierach's "deceptively laconic prose masks an accomplished storyteller...his alert and slightly off-kilter observations place him in the general neighborhood of Mark Twain and James Thurber" (Publishers Weekly). A Fly Rod of Your Own transports readers to streams and rivers from Maine to Montana, and as always, Gierach's fishing trips become the inspiration for his pointed observations on everything from the psychology of fishing ("Fishing is still an oddly passive-aggressive business that depends on the prey being the aggressor"); why even the most veteran fisherman will muff his cast whenever he's being filmed or photographed; the inevitable accumulation of more gear than one could ever need ("Nature abhors an empty pocket. So does the tackle industry"); or the qualities shared by the best guides ("the generosity of a teacher, the craftiness of a psychiatrist, and the enthusiasm of a cheerleader with a kind of Vulcan detachment"). As Gierach likes to say, "fly-fishing is a continuous process that you learn to love for its own sake. Those who fish already get it, and those who don't couldn't care less, so don't waste your breath on someone who doesn't fish." A Fly Rod of Your Own is an ode to those who fish that "brings a skeptical, wry voice to the peril and promise of twenty-first-century fishing" (Booklist).
In a Panamanian pond, male tungara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) gather in choruses, giving their "advertisement" call to the females that move among them. If a female chooses to make physical contact with a male, he will clasp her and eventually fertilize her eggs. But in vying for the females, the males whose calls are most attractive may also attract the interest of another creature: the fringe-lipped bat, a frog eater. In the Tungara Frog, the most detailed and informative single study available of frogs and their reproductive behavior, Michael J. Ryan demonstrates the interplay of sexual and natural selection. Using techniques from ethology, behavioral ecology, sensory physiology, physiological ecology, and theoretical population genetics in his research, Ryan shows that large males with low-frequency calls mate most successfully. He examines in detail a number of explanations for the females' preferences, and he considers possible evolutionary forces leading to the males' success. Though certain vocalizations allow males to obtain mates and thus should be favored by sexual selection, this study highlights two important costs of such sexual displays: the frogs expand considerable energy in their mating calls, and they advertise their whereabouts to predators. Ryan considers in detail how predators, especially the frige-lipped bat (Trachops cirrhosus), affect the evolution of the tungara frog's calls.
This friendly, practical guide includes everything you need to know to pick up a spade, put in a pond and help wildlife flourish right outside your back door. Ponds are vital oases for nature. They are nursery grounds, feeding stops and bathing spots. They are genetic superhighways and vibrant ecosystems each brimming with life, interactions and potential. And they are for everyone. In The Wildlife Pond Book, Jules Howard offers a fresh perspective on ponds and encourages gardeners to reach for a garden spade and do something positive to benefit our shared neighbourhood nature. As well as offering practical tips and advice on designing, planting up and maintaining your pond, Jules encourages readers to explore the wildlife that colonises it with a torch, a microscope or a good old-fashioned pond-dipping net. With a foreword by award-winning wildlife-gardening author, Kate Bradbury, this helpful new guide includes a section outlining the hundreds of organisms that may turn up in your pond and is packed with creative ideas that have been tried and tested by author Jules Howard, an avid pond-builder, prolific pond-dipper and passionate voice for freshwater conservation for more than fifteen years. So, no matter how big your outdoor space is, The Wildlife Pond Book is the guide you need to create your very own haven for nature.
The Gulf of Mexico is one of the world's premier fishing grounds. This book is designed to help you learn about and identify its most common sport fish. Fascinating facts about habitat, Gulf distribution, world records, edibility and more make this a must-have, while the waterproof pages are perfect for use on the boat or pier. With this handy field guide, identifying your catch has never been easier or more enjoyable!
The heartbreaking and true story of a lonely orca named Luna who
befriended humans in Nootka Sound, off the coast of Vancouver
Island by Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm.
Illuminating the conditions for global governance to have precipitated the devastating decline of one of the ocean's most majestic creatures The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is the world's foremost organization for managing and conserving tunas, seabirds, turtles, and sharks traversing international waters. Founded by treaty in 1969, ICCAT stewards what has become under its tenure one of the planet's most prominent endangered fish: the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Called "red gold" by industry insiders for the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands in the sushi economy, the giant bluefin tuna has crashed in size and number under ICCAT's custodianship. With regulations to conserve these sea creatures in place for half a century, why have so many big bluefin tuna vanished from the Atlantic? In Red Gold, Jennifer E. Telesca offers unparalleled access to ICCAT to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. ICCAT manages the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires-and, as a result, has become complicit in their extermination. The decades of regulating fish as commodities have had disastrous consequences. Amid the mass extinction of all kinds of life today, Red Gold reacquaints the reader with the splendors of the giant bluefin tuna through vignettes that defy technoscientific and market rationales. Ultimately, this book shows, changing the way people value marine life must come not only from reforming ICCAT but from transforming the dominant culture that consents to this slaughter.
Although Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing--or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the "best book ever written about nature," and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael's sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did far more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851. A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow's nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851--at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab's and Ishmael's worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis. And although the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville's narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with contemporary scientists, fishers, and whale watch operators, Ahab's Rolling Sea offers new insight not only into a cherished masterwork and its author but also into our evolving relationship with the briny deep--from whale hunters to climate refugees.
One of New York Times' Twelve Books for Feminist Boys and Girls! This is the story of a woman who dared to dive, defy, discover, and inspire. This is the story of Shark Lady. One of the best science picture books for children, Shark Lady is a must for both teachers and parents alike! An Amazon Best Book of the Month Named a Best Children's Book of 2017 by Parents magazine Eugenie Clark fell in love with sharks from the first moment she saw them at the aquarium. She couldn't imagine anything more exciting than studying these graceful creatures. But Eugenie quickly discovered that many people believed sharks to be ugly and scary-and they didn't think women should be scientists. Determined to prove them wrong, Eugenie devoted her life to learning about sharks. After earning several college degrees and making countless discoveries, Eugenie wrote herself into the history of science, earning the nickname "Shark Lady." Through her accomplishments, she taught the world that sharks were to be admired rather than feared and that women can do anything they set their minds to. An inspiring story by critically acclaimed zoologist Jess Keating about finding the strength to discover truths that others aren't daring enough to see. Includes a timeline of Eugenie's life and many fin-tastic shark facts! The perfect choice for parents looking for: Books about sharks Inspiring nonfiction narrative books Role model books for girls and boys Kids STEM books
Jim Nollman is an internationally known musician and ecologist who doesn't hesitate to get up-close and personal with a pod of gray whales, a herd of buffaloes, and a school of dolphins in his quest to communicate directly with these creatures. His writing conveys his joy and sense of brotherhood in these encounters. 'The Man Who Talks to Whales' opens us up to the idea that animals can educate us and contribute to the growth and development of our own species.
Aquatic animals possess amazing defensive and offensive specialisations. Many, like the shark, are beautiful to behold in their native environment. In over 470 colourful photographs, this book captures the beauty of these creatures and offers a rich source of facts about them. There are sections dealing with their identifying features, biology, and habitat, as well as a section on prevention, first aid, and emergency procedures. There are also 11 colour maps, a glossary, and suggested readings. Included are: sharks, rays, and other wound-producing animals; aquatic animals that sting; invertebrates and vertebrates poisonous to eat; electric fishes and human parasitic catfish.
Full-color illustrations of 278 of the most common fresh- and salt-water fishes accompany clear and concise descriptions that tell:
"Cephalopods are often misunderstood creatures. Three biologists set the record straight."--Science News Largely shell-less relatives of clams and snails, the marine mollusks in the class Cephalopoda--Greek for "head-foot"--are colorful creatures of many-armed dexterity, often inky self-defense, and highly evolved cognition. They are capable of learning, of retaining information--and of rapid decision-making to avoid predators and find prey. They have eyes and senses rivaling those of vertebrates like birds and fishes, they morph texture and body shape, and they change color faster than a chameleon. In short, they captivate us. From the long-armed mimic octopus--able to imitate the appearance of swimming flounders and soles--to the aptly named flamboyant cuttlefish, whose undulating waves of color rival the graphic displays of any LCD screen, there are more than seven hundred species of cephalopod. Featuring a selection of species profiles, Octopus, Squid, and Cuttlefish reveals the evolution, anatomy, life history, behaviors, and relationships of these spellbinding animals. Their existence proves that intelligence can develop in very different ways: not only are cephalopods unusually large-brained invertebrates, they also carry two-thirds of their neurons in their arms. A treasure trove of scientific fact and visual explanation, this worldwide illustrated guide to cephalopods offers a comprehensive review of these fascinating and mysterious underwater invertebrates--from the lone hunting of the octopus, to the social squid, and the prismatic skin signaling of the cuttlefish.
"A necessary book for anyone truly interested in what we take from
the sea to eat, and how, and why." -Sam Sifton, "The New York Times
Book Review." |
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