REVIEWS

BULLETIN OF MARINE SCIENCE, 65(3): 686, 1999

WATER AND LIGHT: A DIVER’S JOURNEY TO A CORAL REEF, by Stephen Harrigan. 1999. 277 p. ISBN 0-292-73120-5. University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. $19.95, paperback.

The author, after growing up on the coast and with wonderful memories of past years as a highly active scuba diver, finds himself living many miles from the sea. His present responsibilities force him to treat scuba diving as a mere hobby with ever longer time- gaps in his dive log rather than a life’s mission that he had long marveled. He realizes that he must rid himself of that feeling and so he decides to travel to an island where he’ll plant himself for a period of months and dive every day, studying the natural history of a coral reef and learning to understand his “underwater self.” The Caribbean island he chooses is Grand Turk, one of a series of small islands that form the British Commonwealth nation known as the Turks and Caicos. He checks into a small hotel on this rather desolate island, and shortly thereafter begins assisting one of the two small dive operations on the island, and exploring the nearby reefs and the Grand Turk wall. His enthusiasm for the ocean and its mysteries results not only in highly inter- esting and often amusing anecdotes about his experiences with parrotfishes, garden eels, blennies, octopuses. spider crabs, black coral, turtles, and humpback whales, but also numerous facts about the natural history of the animals he meets during his dives: the various life forms of corals, sex change in groupers, the algal gardens of damselfishes, plakatfarben of fishes, cleaning symbioses, lobster lodes, and the ever present plankton. The author includes interesting diving lore from his past experiences in other regions, a story about the development of the aqualung by Cousteau and Gagnan and his chats with the locals about the history of Grand Turk and Cockburn Town. Harrigan is a talented writer who reveals a dazzling underwater world to the reader and at times his prose is exceptional. The book, though not error-free in its facts (e.g., the lateral line of fishes does not respond to pressure) and a bit flowery in its prose, particularly in the first chap- ter, should be in the library of every dive enthusiast and read by others who wish to experience the wonders of the underwater world even from an armchair.—Arthur A. Myrberg, Jr., Division of Marine Biology and Fisheries, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, 4600 Rickenbacker Causeway, Miami, Florida 33149-1098.

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