Alasdair McIntyre: Life in the World's Oceans
The Census of Marine Life is about the total richness of the sea:
The Census of Marine Life is the book of oceans’ nature.
This book reports total richness.
It reports richness of diversity, the richness of what.
It is about kinorhynchs, tardigrades, rotifers, gastrotrichs, and tantulocarids housed in Arctic polynyas.
It is about Antarctic actiniarians, pycnogonids, tunicates, and holothurians.
It is about the golden V kelp in the Aleutian Islands.
It is about polychaetes, bivalves, and isopods of the continental margins.
It is about sturgeon and salmon, sea turtles and pinnipeds, otters and sirenia.
It is about filter feeders.
It is about radiolaria and hydrozoa.
It is about lanternfishes and pearlfishes and roundnose grenadiers.
It is about a black, benthopelagic lobate ctenophore and a large pelagic worm with ten long cephalic tentacles.
It is about 10,000 crabs.
It is about 5,000 to 19,000 unique types of bacteria in each gram of sand.
It is about Upper Turonian diatoms.
This is a book about vastness and deepness.
It reports richness of distributions, the richness of where.
It is about the Western and Eastern Pacific, and about South American seas.
It is about Caribbean, European, and Polar seas and Indian and Atlantic oceans.
It is about the abyssal plains and basins beneath half of Earth's surface.
It is about the Porcupine Abyssal Plain.
It is about the canyons of the margins.
It is about large shallow banks and gravelly shorelines.
It is about Lizard Island and Ningaloo Reef.
It is about the architecture of seamounts.
This is a book of journeys.
It is about leatherback turtles tagged on their nesting beaches in Indonesia crossing Pacific longitudes to feed off central California.
It is about sooty shearwaters flying Pacific latitudes from New Zealand to the Bering Sea.
It is about water columns 5,000 meters high.
It is about the planet's busiest commute, the nightly rise of life from hundreds of meters deep to feed nearer the surface in the safety of darkness.
It is about circumpolar currents.
This is a book that explores abundance, the richness of how much.
It is about the northerly flowing Kuroshio Current along the southern Japanese coast characterized by high biodiversity but low biomass.
It is about shimmering shoals of herring swirling in numbers beyond counting.
This is a book about past richness.
It is about Greek merchants trading fish from the Black Sea and the Russian rivers to the Greek and later the Roman market.
It is about the decline of marbled rock cod and mackerel ice fish west of the Antarctic Peninsula.
This is a book of lost reefs.
This is a book about life and death.
It is about juvenile salmon and adult sturgeon.
It is about immature specimens carrying sperm packages.
It is about the loneliness of reproductive isolation.
It is about mass mortality.
It is about small dead coral heads.
It is about prey fields patrolled by marine hunters.
It is about fidelity to birthplace.
This is a book of paradoxes, where extreme is normal and rare is common.
This is a book of contrasts.
It is about the cosmopolitan and the local.
It is about glaciation and boiling seafloor geysers where metal would melt yet animals live.
It is about ancient assemblages and modern benthos.
It is about swimmers and drifters and sitters.
This is a book of mysteries.
It is about oceanic barriers to gene flow.
It is about trophic subsidies to carnivores.
It is about the immense volume of ocean still unexplored.
It is about 20 million marine microbes that might remain to be described.
It is about cryptic species.
It is a book of powerful prostheses.
It is a book of ships and sledges and gliders and pyrotags.
It is a book of attached identity cards and different mesh sizes.
It is a book that filters a million cubic meters of seawater.
It is a book of blue-water divers.
It is a book where yellow dots are actual observations of lionfish.
This book reports the known, unknown, and unknowable of the first Census of Marine Life.
This book is about the richness of 3.5 billion years.
