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    Weird Sea Creatures
    Weird Sea Creatures
    Weird Sea Creatures
    Ebook133 pages32 minutes

    Weird Sea Creatures

    By Erich Hoyt

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    About this ebook

    An illustrated look at the weird and wonderful creatures that live in the very deepest parts of the sea.

    Humans have always wondered, with a mixture of fear and fascination, what lurks beneath the surface in the depths of the ocean. In this book, Erich Hoyt introduces 50 of the oddest creatures you will ever meet in the sea. From the carnivorous comb jelly to the lantern-carrying deep-sea dragonfish, from a vampire squid with giant eyes to dancing jellyfish, Hoyt explores these peculiar conditions and their equally peculiar environment.

    These creatures have adapted to lack of light and, using sound pulses (echolocation) or light-producing organs and pigment cells (emitting light via bioluminescence), they are able to communicate without giving their location away to predators.

    These stunning, captivating photographs weren't taken from the portholes of submarines. Photographers David Shale, Solvin Zanki and Jeff Rotman worked with oceanography institutes, museums and the BBC Natural History Unit, taking long cruises across the ocean to record and try to understand these little-studied residents of the deep sea. To capture the creatures for observation, a net was lowered far beneath the surface. As soon as the trawl was hauled aboard, the photographers would race to transfer the most unusual animals to fresh seawater aquariums in a chilled laboratory on board.

    These pages let readers gaze into strange, wild eyes and study faces with toothless or crooked smiles that witness the fruits of deep-sea evolution. Informative captions explain what the patterns of lights on their bodies are "saying" to others in their absolutely dark world. The wonder and extraordinary weirdness of what lives in the deep seas, so far away from us and yet so close, will become more familiar with this book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFirefly Books
    Release dateMar 5, 2015
    ISBN9781770856493
    Weird Sea Creatures

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      Book preview

      Weird Sea Creatures - Erich Hoyt

      INTRODUCTION

      IN this book you will meet 50 of the oddest animals that live in the sea. Many of them have been discovered by scientists so recently that they have no definite scientific name. Even fewer have a specific common name. Weird creatures ought to get noticed and named. But common names are given to creatures commonly encountered. If an animal lives deep in the sea and manages to avoid capture, then it can carry on indefinitely, keeping its identity secret. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then, for sure, each photo of these 50 weird sea creatures deserves a thousand names.

      What makes these creatures odd or weird? More than anything, it is the environment in which they live in the deep ocean — the peculiar conditions to which they’ve adapted. These include intense pressure far beyond our imagination, and lack of light. In fact, 99% of the sun’s light does not permeate below the topmost 330 feet (100 m) of the surface of the sea.

      This cast of odd creatures and their deep-sea habitats might seem as far away and improbable as life on Mars. Yet many of them live almost within touching distance in the sense that if you live on the coast or are on a beach vacation or have ever traveled on a cruise ship or ferry, certain deep-sea animals in this book can be found no more than a mile or two away from you. From a ship at sea, for example, grabbing hold of a weight belt or an anchor and taking a deep breath, you could be down among the big-eyed squid and flashing bioluminescent fish in 20 minutes. The problem, of course, even with scuba gear, is that you would not be alive when you finally got near them. The intense pressure would kill you. It is possible to go very deep in a submarine, but few submarines travel below the upper layers of the ocean. Submarine time for deep-sea-going vessels, even if you can get it, costs the equivalent of King Neptune’s

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