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:
Buy me a coffee
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

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

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more