Skip to main content

Into the Great Wide Ocean - Sönke Johnsen *****

Although they are often bracketed together, 'nature' and 'science' are only loosely related topics. Sönke Johnsen's look at life in the open sea (both for scientists and its inhabitants) could have ended up as something close to the David Attenborough end of the spectrum, but I'm pleased to say that although it's more descriptive than some popular science, the book still gives us more insights than 'nature' books and TV provide, from its marine biology focus.

Johnsen starts by remembering his first experience of the oceans - the same as most of us from seaside holidays. As he puts it 'I thought the beach was the ocean; that somehow the whole ocean was the sound of breaking waves, laughing gulls, and greenish murky water that smelled faintly of rotting seafood.' By the time he made graduate school as a marine biologist he saw the ocean as 'an oversized aquarium, clear and packed with life... If the beach was the peel of the ocean, though, I was still only in the rind...' It was only as a post-doc that he started to understand the sheer variety and complexity of life in the open seas.

Once we start talking about the 'ocean less visited', a natural tendency is to think of the collection of deep sea oddities that are regularly portrayed in nature programmes - but Johnsen makes it clear that that what he's covering is top 1,000 feet or so of the ocean, because, perhaps surprisingly, it has received far less attention.

This book is a joyous invocation of the experience of a marine biologist - we get some fascinating insights into  life on a research vessel - and what it is about this part of the seas that requires living creatures to cope with a whole range of problems from the basics of gravity and water pressure to the essentials of survival. Johnsen's earliest research interest had been around vision and, for instance, he brings out the difficulties of understanding the sight-related abilities and limitations of organisms in this 'pelagic' part of the seas.

I'm not a natural target for biology books, and the ones that have generally really caught my attention have been those with something of an orientation to the physics-related aspects of life, such as Philip Ball's remarkable How Life Works. But Johnsen's infectious storytelling engaged me from page one. This is simple reading pleasure for anyone who has felt that same seaside interest in the ocean that first captured Johnsen's attention in his childhood and wants to discover what goes on away from shore. Delightful.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...
Post a Comment
Read more