Ocean Bestiary tells the history of our relationship with the sea one animal at a time from A
to Z. From the earliest Polynesian navigators to the pilots of deep-sea submersibles today
humans have been exploring the globe's most dominant and inaccessible ecosystem and bringing
home to those ashore breathtaking accounts of what they observed. Jumping off from the stories
of whalemen pirates explorers immigrants naturalists writers painters and
cruiser-sailors-some famous some entirely unknown and unpublished-this little book examines
and shares what it was they saw. Ocean Bestiary crosses a range of geographies and oceanic
environments from shallows to depths and including coral reefs upwelling zones and more. It
covers an equally wide range of organisms as well from tiny zooplankton to immense whales. In
playful prose Richard J. King unfurls his stories and their relevance today for our
understanding of environmental history the history of marine biology and our shifting
perceptions of the ocean--
