The World Beneath The Life and Times of Unknown Sea Creatures and Coral Reefs

About this book

A new enhanced edition of the best-selling guide to sea creatures: The World Beneath.

Meet the world's most fascinating sea creatures, see the lives and curiosities of colorful fish and coral reefs. This spectacular volume has more than 300 colour photos and extraordinary text from a leading marine biologist and underwater photographer who is the international expert on seahorses.

In this richly informative volume, brimming with new discoveries and more than three hundred colourful images of jaw-dropping fish and coral reefs, you'll swim in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; you'll be dazzled in the Coral Triangle and amazed in Triton Bay. Up close you'll meet the Cenderawasih fairy wrasse, with its florescent yellow streak; the polka-dot longnose filefish; and the multicoloured seadragon. There are scarlet-coloured corals, baby-blue sponges, daffodil crinoids, and all sorts of mystifying creatures that change colour at the drop of a hat. The whale shark is almost larger than life and the author's beloved pygmy seahorse, unless photographed, is almost too tiny to see.

The wondrous creatures inside are charmers and tricksters and excel in the arts of seduction and deception, and you'll have the rare chance to see and delight in their antics. You'll also learn what they eat, how they play, and how they care for one another, live on one another, and mimic others when they're afraid. There is also compelling insight into the naming process, which sea creatures are facing extinction, and how we can help them before it's too late.

This new and expanded edition of The World Beneath has new text from award-winning author Dr Richard Smith that covers recent developments and discoveries affecting the rapidly changing landscape of the world's coral reefs, a wealth of new images from recent dives around the world, and a thorough index.

Contents

Preface

1. Diving In
2. How the Reef Works
3. The Coral Triangle
4. New Discoveries of the Twenty-First Century
5. Things That Live on Things
6. The Unseemly World of Anemonefish
7. Pygmy Seahorses: Tales from the Stables
8. Parasites Rule the Reef
9. Colors of the Reef
10. Flashers and Fairies
11. Coral Reefs in the Twenty-First Century
12. Future of the World's Reefs

Epilogue
Notes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Dr. Richard Smith is a marine biologist and conservationist, an award-winning underwater photographer, an acclaimed public speaker, and the leader of diving expeditions around the world; he's been on more than four thousand dives since 1996. Dr. Smith has written hundreds of articles, published internationally, with a primary focus on conservation and marine life. His photographs have been featured around the world, including on dozens of magazine covers and in exhibitions. In 2018 he identified a new species of pygmy seahorse, having first photographed it five years previously. The new species, Hippocampus japapigu, is the size of a grain of rice and from the temperate waters of Japan. In 2020 he named the first pygmy seahorse to be found in the Indian Ocean, the South African Pygmy Seahorse, H. nalu. Dr. Smith has a bachelor's degree in Zoology, a master's degree in Marine Ecology and Evolution, and a PhD that he received for his pioneering research on pygmy seahorses; it was the first PhD ever awarded for the subject. Dr. Smith is a member of the IUCN Seahorse, Pipefish and Seadragon Specialist Group, and the world authority on these fishes, and the Global Pygmy Seahorse Expert for iSeahorse.org, which uses citizen science to further research and conservation. He lives in Oxfordshire, England.