Sensuous Seas: Tales of a Marine Biologist

The feeding and mating habits of some of the ocean's strangest creatures are the subject of these 31 entertaining essays by Hofstra ecologist Kaplan. He introduces each chapter with a story dramatizing the factual information—such as the tale of his painful encounter with the tentacles of a Portuguese man o' war—but the inducement is unnecessary, as the biology is fascinating in its own right. His man o' war, for example, is a jellyfish that has "[n]o brain, no blood, no heart, no anus," yet is able to paralyze its prey with "poison arrows." The other creatures he describes are equally bizarre. They include barnacles that live in the bodies of crabs, eating all the hosts' internal organs except those necessary to keep the crabs alive; sinister fish in the Amazon basin that can enter a human body through the genitals and tear up the person's innards; sea anemones and clownfish that live in a symbiotic relationship in which the fish feed the anemones and are in return protected by the anemones' tentacles. Kaplan's lively essays, accompanied by 150 exquisite line drawings, are a wonderful introduction to the mysteries of the ocean. (Aug.)