In 1992, the Sherkin Island Marine Station, off the south-west coast of Ireland, published a stunning collection of undersea images by scientific photographer, Paul Kay, titled Ireland’s Marine Life: A World of Beauty. Paul had been introduced to the wonders that live below the tideline when he worked as a volunteer at the Marine Station in the early 1980s. His experiences led him to a successful career, with thousands of his photographs being published in magazines and books throughout the world.
Digital Imagery
During the almost two decades since the publication of that first book, much has been learned about marine life, while the development of digital imagery has vastly increased the possibilities open to the photographer. The result is that this new collection, Ireland’s Hidden Depths, surpasses even the very high standards of its predecessor.
While the images in the earlier book followed no particular scheme, and were described by minimal text, those in the new publication are grouped into chapters, which, if not strictly scientific in their order, are at least logical to the non-specialist. Each of the images is accompanied by a short paragraph, written with a light touch and fully accessible to any reader, including the interested school student embarking on his or her first encounters with Biology. Indeed this is just the kind of publication that could inspire such students toward a career in Marine Science.
The individual chapters look at anemones, crabs, starfish, fish, shellfish, sponges, worms and plant life, together with their related species. Each chapter contains upward of a dozen images, leading to a total of around 200. In addition to the beauty of life in the shallow coastal waters, they illustrate its amazing diversity.
Anemones and Relatives
The chapter on anemones, for example, which includes soft corals and jellyfish, takes the reader far beyond the experience of seeing small red blobs in a rock pool. Most of these creatures do remain fixed, but some move around. Some have hard skeletons. Some live in sand or soft mud. They vary in size from a few millimetres to 30 centimetres. Some live in colonies, while others are solitary. Soft corals have no skeletons, and so do not form reefs.
Most jellyfish are free-floating, while a few cling to seaweed. And the colours are so varied that the temperate waters of the Irish coast present a display to rival even that of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Variety of Sea Life
Of necessity, only a tiny selection of the 400-500 fish species are represented, but their astonishing variety of form and colour are emphasised. Many worms are beautifully fan-like. Coralline algae, though a plant, often gets washed onto beaches, where its bleached remains create the illusion of a strand composed of coral. Much of the life illustrated is confined to the regions between low and high tides, and so is subject to large changes in temperature and turbulence during a single day.
Though this wonderful book is aimed at the non-specialist reader, it would be a valuable addition to the shelves of any Marine Science laboratory. It gives a glimpse of the amazing beauties of a world about which we know so little, and yet are in danger of losing if we do not care for our environment as we should.
Ireland's Hidden Depths (Sherkin Island Marine Station, 2011) ISBN: 978 1 870492 53 9
160 pages, softback. Size: 277 x 227 mm
Price: 17.99 Euro (Postage: Ireland - 2 Euro; Rest of World - 7.50 Euro)
Anthony Toole - I was born and brought up in the English Lake District, where I have walked and climbed for most of my life. I was educated as a scientist ...
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