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

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more