Coffee Table Book of: Pelagic Giants (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Pelagic Giants is a large format book of the fish of the open ocean, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: blue marlin, black marlin and striped marlin, sailfish, broadbill swordfish and shortbill spearfish, bluefin, yellowfin, bigeye, albacore and skipjack tunas, green and gold mahi mahi, wahoo, king mackerel, rainbow runner, greater amberjack, ocean sunfish and silver flying fish in deep blue water.

Beside the tunas and billfishes swim the other hunters and travellers of the surface waters: a bull and female mahi mahi under floating sargassum weed, a long barred wahoo built for high speed sprints, a sleek king mackerel, a striped rainbow runner, a greater amberjack, a silver flying fish gliding above the swells on spread pectoral fins, and the tall flat ocean sunfish sculling through clear midwater beside drifting jellyfish.

Seen close are the working structures of open water life: a sailfish’s raised dorsal membrane lit from behind, the serrated beaklike jaws of a wahoo, the fleshy keels on a bluefin tuna’s narrow tail wrist, the row of yellow finlets ahead of a tail fin, a dorsal fin folded flush into its groove, the corselet scales at a tuna’s shoulder, the suction disc on top of a remora’s head, and a mirror silver flank.

Around the fishes is the open ocean itself at every hour and weather: tight spheres of silver sardines, diving gannets and shearwaters, a swooping frigatebird, jetting flying squid, golden mats of drifting sargassum with their gas berry floats and camouflaged frogfish, current fronts and glassy internal wave bands, noon sunbeams, the bright overhead circle of the sky seen from below, whitecap churn and glowing blue night plankton.

Short notes run through the book, on how open ocean fishes swim, breathe and keep warm, how hunters and schooling prey meet in blue water, and how light and drifting weed shape life far from shore: a marlin’s bill is a lengthened upper jaw, and female blue marlin grow far larger than males, tunas breathe by swimming forward with the mouth slightly parted to force water across their large gills, mature male mahi mahi grow a high steep forehead, while females keep a more gently rounded head profile, and seawater absorbs red light within a few metres of the top, leaving the clear open ocean a deep cobalt blue.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.