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 Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more