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Books > Sport & Leisure > Natural history, country life & pets > Wild animals > Aquatic creatures > General
The labor of turtle hunters and the shaping of Caribbean history.
Illuminating the entangled histories of the people and commodities
that circulated across the Atlantic, Sharika D. Crawford assesses
the Caribbean as a waterscape where imperial and national
governments vied to control the profitability of the sea. Crawford
places the green and hawksbill sea turtles and the Caymanian
turtlemen who hunted them at the center of this waterscape. The
story of the humble turtle and its hunter, she argues, came to play
a significant role in shaping the maritime boundaries of the modern
Caribbean. Crawford describes the colonial Caribbean as an Atlantic
commons where all could compete to control the region's diverse
peoples, lands, and waters and exploit the region's raw materials.
Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Crawford traces
and connects the expansion and decline of turtle hunting to matters
of race, labor, political and economic change, and the natural
environment. Like the turtles they chased, the boundary-flouting
laborers exposed the limits of states' sovereignty for a time but
ultimately they lost their livelihoods, having played a significant
role in legislation delimiting maritime boundaries. Still, former
turtlemen have found their deep knowledge valued today in efforts
to protect sea turtles and recover the region's ecological
sustainability.
During the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, California's coast seemed
awash in abalone. From San Diego to Crescent City, people feasted
on abalone steaks and glimmering shells were sold in trinket shops.
Abalones' remarkable abundance and appeal made them icons of
California's easy-living, laid-back beach culture. But just a few
decades later, many younger Californians had never seen the
legendary mollusk. In the past twenty years, two of California's
seven abalone species have joined the U.S. Endangered Species list,
and even the hardiest now faces the ecological collapse of its home
habitat in Northern California - long regarded as a sure
stronghold. After more than 70 million years of gripping
tenaciously to North America's western shoreline, how - in our time
- did the fate of the delicious, wondrous, and once abundant
abalone become so precarious?
The Fishes of the Western North Atlantic series, which began
publication in the 1940s by Yale University's Sears Foundation for
Marine Research, was from its beginnings conceived to synthesize
and make accessible the wealth of information in widely scattered
published accounts of the fish fauna of the region for both the
layman and the specialist, presenting critical reviews rather than
compilations. These reference works are still considered valuable
and of interest today to both general audiences and the academic
community. As described in the Preface to the first volume, the
series was "written on the premise that it should be useful to
those in many walks of life-to those casually ... interested ...,
to the sportsman ..., to the fisherman ..., as well as to the
amateur ichthyologist and the professional scientist." These books
remain authoritative studies of the anadromous, estuarine, and
marine fishes of the waters of the western North Atlantic from
Hudson Bay southward to the Amazon, ranking as primary references
for both amateurs and professionals interested in fishes, and as
significant working tools for students of the sea.
Part One, the inaugural volume in the Fishes of the Western North
Atlantic series, describes lancelets, hagfishes, lampreys, and
sharks. Specialist authorships of its sections include detailed
species descriptions with keys, life history and general habits,
abundance, range, and relation to human activity, such as economic
and sporting importance. The text is written for an audience of
amateur and professional ichthyologists, sportsmen, and fishermen,
based on new revisions, original research, and critical reviews of
existing information. Species are illustrated by exceptional black
and white line drawings, accompanied by distribution maps and
tables of meristic data. Distributed for the Yale Peabody Museum of
Natural History
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