Billfish preparing to dice and slice (or rather gun and stun).
One problem with a lot of writing about the natural world is that it’s all plotline, and the plotline is depressingly familiar: The world is a mess, it’s getting messier by the minute, and in the end, or probably sooner, everybody dies.
Oh, and it’s your fault.
“How can you care about the plot,” asks Stephen R. Palumbi, a biologist and director of the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University, “until you care about the characters?” That’s how he and his son Anthony R. Palumbi, a science writer, came up with the idea for their new book The Extreme Life of the Sea, a tour of “the fastest, the deepest, the coldest, and the hottest” creatures in the oceans, minus “the sensational fearmongering of ‘Shark Week.’ ”
The result is a giddy scientific tour of weird underwater life, or what the elder Palumbi calls “a collection of guiltless wonder about amazing things going on in the oceans, things that are mostly secrets, except to marine biologists.”
For instance, the authors point out that some Antarctic fish can die of heat stroke at 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Many corals, meanwhile, falter at 90 degrees. But hold that guilt! They mean this by way of introducing Read the rest of this entry »
strange behaviors 