The science and common sense behind creating an inexpensive, flourishing marine aquarium Marine Aquarium Keeping is the first complete, step-by-step handbook to bring scientific perspective and insight to the practical basics of assembling and successfully maintaining a conventional marine aquarium. While minimizing gadgetry and underscoring a simple, commonsense regimen of looking, seeing, and understanding, author and marine biologist Stephen Spotte offers logical, chapter-by-chapter guidance to every facet of the hobby—from choosing equipment and setting up an aquarium, to selecting healthy animals and maintaining a flourishing underwater environment. Inside, readers will discover:

• How to make a new aquarium suitable for sustaining life
• How to select healthy animals from species demonstrating good captive survival
• The step-by-step basics of routine maintenance
• How to easily meet the nutritional requirements of marine animals
• The key to disease prevention
• The use of seawater and artificial seawaters
• The living subgravel filter
• Aquarium decorations as shelter spaces and as aesthetic features
• The marine aquarium as a living community

An extensive health and disease section offers detailed, easy-to-follow treatment regimens, several unique to this volume, for a variety of common diseases. Current controversies and popular myths surrounding aquarium keeping, such as the benefits of supplemental light and the superiority of plastic filtrants, are also examined. A wealth of black-and-white and color photographs that strikingly depict marine animals in their natural habitat bring key facets of the text to life. Indispensable to the amateur aquarist who appreciates both the beauty and science of this fascinating pastime, this newest edition of the popular classic is the complete guide to successful, inexpensive marine aquarium keeping.

Feral and stray domestic cats occupy many different habitats. They can resist dehydration for months by relying exclusively on the tissue water of their prey allowing them to colonize remote deserts and other inhospitableplaces. They thrive and reproduce in humid equatorial rainforests and windswept subantarctic islands. In many areas of the world feral cats have driven some species of birds and mammals to extinction and others to the edge, becoming a huge conservation concern. With the control of feral and stray cats now a top conservation priority, biologists are intensifying efforts to understand cat behaviour, reproductive biology, use of space, intraspecies interaction, dietary requirements, prey preferences, and vulnerability to different managementstrategies.This book provides the most comprehensive review yet published on the behavior, ecology and management of free-ranging domestic cats, whether they be owned, stray, or feral. It reviews management methods and their progress, and questions several widely accepted views of free-ranging cats, notably that they live within dominance hierarchies and are highly social.

Insightful and objective, this book includes: a functional approach, emphasizing sensory biology, reproductive physiology, nutrition, and spacepartitioning;clear treatment of how free-ranging cats should be managed;extensive critical interpretation of the world's existing literature;results of studies of cats in laboratories under controlled conditions, with data that can also beapplied to pet cats.

"Free-ranging Cats: Behavior, Ecology, Management" is valuable to ecologists, conservation scientists, animal behaviorists, wildlife nutritionists, wildlife biologists, research and wildlife veterinarians, clinical veterinarians, mammalogists, and park and game reserve planners and administrators.