Ocean Bestiary: Meeting Marine Life from Abalone to Orca to Zooplankton

In this shallow outing, King (Ahab’s Rolling Sea), a professor at the Sea Education Association, provides an A-to-Z survey of ocean animals. He profiles marine animals and tells of their notable encounters with humans, spanning Polynesian voyagers’ first contact with New Zealand sea lions around 1200 CE through to a Japanese biologist’s successful efforts to photograph a living giant squid in 2004. Some of the more amusing entries describe how a 1920s sea turtle hunter’s practice of carving his initials into turtle shells inspired a marine biologist to conduct tagging studies on the animals’ migration, as well as how whale sharks eat by ingesting krill-filled ocean water that gets filtered through “twenty spongy, porous pads” in the shark’s throat. Other dispatches are more superficial; a chapter on mako sharks focuses on the predator’s role in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The author contributes some charming illustrations of the creatures, but the entries vary in quality and the breezy approach sometimes leads to a lack of substance. Readers looking for a pop science survey of marine life would be better off with Helen Scales’s Eye of the Shoal. (May)