Author Description

This photographic guide to sea shore animals and plants represents a completely new approach to field guides. It is aimed at those who wish to find and identify organisms encountered on the sea shore or immediately offshore quickly and easily while promoting their conservation. Uniquely, each species is illustrated by a photograph and, in most cases, accompanied by a line drawing that emphasizes the critical features for identification and a map to show the distribution of the species in North-West Europe. The text itself deliberately focuses on features that complement the photographs and facilitate identification non-destructively--where, for example, burrowing worms can be identified by digging them up and therefore killing them, only the cast, the part usually seen, is shown. Stress is laid on the importance of exploiting all available information for locating and identifying each species--if two species have identical appearance they are described separately and behavioral, geographical, or seasonal features that distinguish them are described in the text. There is no other guide to seashore organisms like this one; those available are either less comprehensive or less well illustrated. It will appeal to beachcombers of all levels, from families to students and professionals, as well to divers and those visiting the proliferating numbers of commercially run marine aquaria that are open to the public.