Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on March 10, 2008
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2008 48(3):443-444; doi:10.1093/icb/icn007
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Book Review |
Encyclopedia of Tidepools and Rocky Shores. Mark W. Denny and Steven D. Gaines, editors.
Department of Marine Earth and Atmospheric Sciences North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695
Correspondence: E-mail: tom_wolcott{at}ncsu.edu
Encyclopedia of Tidepools and Rocky Shores. Mark W. Denny and Steven D. Gaines, editors.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 735 pp. 736 illustrations. ISBN 9780520251182, $95.00.
Creation of such a reference as this encyclopedia presents two huge challenges: deciding for whose use it is intended, and then deciding what needs to go into it. When I picked this volume up, I was dubious that a single volume, even such a large and generously illustrated one, could have enough depth and breadth to do justice to the subject area. By the time I finally set it down, I was pleasantly surprised, indeed amazed, at how well the editors and contributors pulled it off.
This volume begins with a "Guide to the Encyclopedia," the first sentence of which states that this is "a comprehensive, complete and authoritative reference dealing with all of the physical and biological aspects of tidepool and rocky shore habitats." This brave assertion smacks of hubris—if the target audience were rocky shore scientists, or even professional biologists, such lofty goals obviously could not be met by even a shelf full of books. The initial declaration is subsequently tempered as the "Guide" and the succeeding "Preface" by the editors, explain that the target audience is a general one, the "interested general public." This presumably means "naïve but scientifically literate readers." It is with such eyes that I attempted to approach the book, having become secondarily naïve after nearly four decades of rocky-shore deprivation, but still retaining (I hope) a modicum of scientific literacy.
If this volume is intended for a general audience, one measure of its usefulness is its accessibility to such readers. There is a large cohort of contributors, and it is not surprising that there is considerable variance in how well they achieved that goal. An especially useful segment is the several articles that together provide almost an "instant invertebrate zoology" course. This serves as an essential introduction to all those strange phyla and body plans to which readers may have had scant exposure in the last decade's vertebrocentric or molecularly oriented curricula. Some of the articles are particularly good at explaining, in plain language, why their subject is interesting and important. A few may be singled out. George Branch does an especially nice job with limpets. Tony Underwood's articles on "monitoring-overview" and "monitoring-statistics" are stunningly readable expositions of what often are brain-desiccating subjects. Dan Rittschof's account of hermit crabs is a simple, readable narrative although light on the details. Wayne Sousa's section on disturbance is lengthy but well done. Toward the other end of the scale, George Jackson's discussion of diffusion begins in plain language but soon plunges into equations that may not be intuitive to a large subset of the audience. Its clarity is hampered by the transposition of Figures 2 and 3 (but not their legends); it was one of those accounts that (for me) required several readings to assimilate. David Lindbergh's overview of molluscs begins with a phrase that may cause many readers’ eyes to glaze over: "Molluscs are bilaterally symmetrical Lophotrochozoa ..." but then simmers down to a more easily digestible style. Almost all of the contributors have done an adequate to good job in tailoring their language to a general audience.
The second big challenge to editors of such a volume is, of course, "What gets included?" Even in a multi-volume set the contents could be only a subset of existing knowledge. What got left out does not leap out if the reader goes paging through all the good stuff. Instead, I closed my eyes and visualized the rocky intertidal as though I had just arrived for my first visit. What would arouse my curiosity? I jotted down a list of 46 topics, then returned to the encyclopedia. Of these 46 ad hoc search terms, 35 were quickly found in the list of topics, and another five were found under "contents by subject area." Two more were found via the index (surprisingly, "mussel" cropped up only there). Only four were left stranded: "burrow," "detachment," "mud," and "shear." It would be a little silly to try and quantify the encyclopedia's usefulness from this exercise, but I thought the book gave a very creditable performance.
There is, perhaps inevitably, a lot of overlap (or, more generously, cross-correlation) between entries. An assiduous reader would hit on one of them and follow the "see also" links to find the wanted information. For instance, there's a section on symbiosis, and another on mutualism. There's a summary article on molluscs, and separate sections that provide more information on bivalves and snails. The segment on near-shore physical processes deals almost entirely with distribution and transport of plankton, and might more logically have been titled accordingly. Another nearshore process, longshore transport, is a phenomenon often obvious and potentially of interest to shoreline visitors (if they knew what to call it.) It is to be found neither under "nearshore physical processes" nor "ocean waves," but is described in the penultimate paragraph of "beach morphology."
The volume has rather more typographical errors than would be expected from the University of California Press. It gets off to an unfortunate start with "temperatres" in the second sentence of the Preface, and startled me with several others as I skipped here and there. The most serious one noted was the apparent swapping of Figs. 2 and 3 in the article on diffusion. The others were simply distractions. The economics-coastal article refers to "totora reef rafts" ("reed rafts?") and uses a phrase that conjures up fascinating mental images: "sea lion inflated rafts." In the stomatopod article, Figure 4 lacks the arrow that the caption says is pointing to the dactyl heel. In the waves article, the caption of Figure 3 omits the photographer's name after "photo by ...". Kevin Eckelbarger's account of marine stations has Louis Agassiz establishing a station near Cape Cod in 1973. These glitches doubtless will be corrected in subsequent printings or editions.
The wealth of illustrations will be very helpful to readers with little prior exposure to the diverse invertebrate phyla, shoreline geology, and many other aspects of the intertidal. The drawings and photographs are clear and well-chosen.
All in all, this encyclopedia is a monumental achievement. It will succeed far better than I would have thought possible in satisfying the curiosity of visitors to rocky shores. When these are primary and secondary school teachers, it will have disproportionate impact due to the "ripple-down" effect. The editors are to be congratulated for pulling it off so elegantly.
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