Teeming Boisterous Life Dents Are Powerfully Motivated by Exposing All Their Senses to Steinbeck’S “Teeming Boister- Known with Good Reason As the ‘Death Apple’

BOOKS & ARTS NATURE|Vol 443|21 September 2006

and learn invertebrate anatomy by preparing a paella. This is not educational sadism, as stu- Teeming boisterous life dents are powerfully motivated by exposing all their senses to Steinbeck’s “teeming boister- known with good reason as the ‘death apple’. ous life”. Watching my own students scramble Sensuous Seas: Tales of a Marine Biologist by Eugene H. Kaplan This compendium of sex and death provides across rocky shores and peer tremulously under Princeton University Press: 2006. 288 pp. plenty for raconteurs wanting to leave a lasting seaweed, I can only agree that these activities $24.95, £15.95 impression on friends, relatives or — in Kap- ignite interest and trigger understanding. lan’s case — students. People sometimes ask me whether the world Jon Copley Each of the 31 chapters opens with either one really needs more marine-biology graduates. “What good men most biologists are, the ten- of Kaplan’s own memoirs or a scenario from his Despite the vast challenge of exploring and ors of the scientific world — temperamental, imagination, before exploring the marine biol- understanding the marine realm, very few moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy,” ogy behind the tale. As a result, a reader may students actually become career scientists, wrote John Steinbeck in The Log from the Sea sometimes wonder where the book is going, as openings are highly competitive now that of Cortez (Viking, 1951). “The true biologist although the entertainment seldom flags. But universities are turning out more and more deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, PhDs. Instead, most marine-biology students and learns something from become professionals in other areas, from it, learns that the first rule of secondary-school teachers to account- life is living.” ants and entrepreneurs. I reassure pro- Steinbeck wrote those spective students that marine biology words on an expedition rewards its devotees with analytical

with his marine-biolo- and interpersonal skillsKAPLAN L. that RIVKIN/S. are C. S. gist friend Ed Ricketts, highly prized in a multitude of but the description also careers. It also instils culturally seems to fit Eugene valuable understanding and Kaplan, the author of respect for the natural world Sensuous Seas. Kaplan’s — and why not have some book is a compilation of entertaining fun along the way? anecdotes from a career that includes Kaplan’s book con- building fish farms in Africa, teaching veys the breadth and science in Israel and establishing the Hofstra excitement of an University Marine Laboratory in Jamaica. The this is in education in marine book celebrates the joy of knowledge for its keeping with Steinbeck’s biology. I recommend own sake, but also demonstrates some of the description of a true The Log from the Sea of Cortez to my tutees interactions between marine biology, everyday biologist: “Sometimes if they want to know what marine biology is lives and even history. he may proliferate a really about. Sensuous Seas is now next on the Take the Mediterranean rock snail Hexaplex little too much in all list — and there is no stronger recommenda- trunculus, which provided the purple dye used directions... meanwhile he is very good com- tion that I could make. ■ by royalty in the classical world. Exploiting the pany, and at least he does not confuse a low Jon Copley is a senior teaching fellow at the commercial opportunities of this snail’s secre- hormone productivity with moral ethics.” National Oceanography Centre, University of tions made Phoenicia, now Lebanon, a major Kaplan believes in hands-on teaching and Southampton, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK. trading power. The same snail may also have advocates the necessity of literally immers- been the ‘hillazon’ animal described in the ing marine-biology students in their subject. MORE ON THE SEA Torah and the Talmud as the source of the dye Drawing on several decades of teaching field Underwater to Get Out of the Rain: A Love used in Jewish prayer shawls. Kaplan also sug- courses in the Caribbean, he describes making Affair with the Sea gests that the fish used to feed the five thousand his students wallow in mud, chase specimens by Trevor Norton (Arrow, £6.99 ) in the Bible would have been tilapia (pictured), whose hardiness holds promise for tackling famine through aquaculture today. Kaplan has been teaching marine biology Astronomy through the years for half a century, and shares his experience of bringing the subject alive. Students are inspired by passion and there is plenty here, both for the with if I wanted to learn about an unlimited The Cosmic Century: A History of subject and of the more earthy kind. Kaplan range of material. Astrophysics and Cosmology discusses with aplomb the pheromones of lam- Longair’s book is a complete reworking and by Malcolm Longair preys, the reckless mating of one-eyed shrimp, Cambridge University Press: 2006. 565 pp. major extension of a chapter he once wrote for and the broken-off reproductive organs of male £35, $60 a history book of twentieth-century physics. squid. One might conclude that he is rather This background perhaps explains how such a preoccupied with matters reproductive, but Jay M. Pasachoff knowledgeable astronomer was inveigled into that is true of most biologists. John F. Kennedy once addressed what he called spending the time needed to gain such a broad There are horrors lurking here too, such as the “most extraordinary collection of talent, of view. It’s no surprise that the author of Alice and the candiru — a fish that can wriggle up the human knowledge, that has ever been gathered the Space Telescope (Johns Hopkins University urethra of its unfortunate victim to lodge in at the White House, with the possible exception Press, 1989) can write clearly and invitingly, but the bladder and feast on the blood. Other perils of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone”. After I had to sample deeply to verify that he did not mentioned in the book include the poisons of diving into Malcolm Longair’s epochal The give short shrift to such wide-ranging topics the pufferfish, the cone shell and the innocu- Cosmic Century, a history of astronomy and as the discovery of exoplanets, the use of helio- ous-looking fruit of the manchineel tree — astrophysics, he is the one I would want to dine seismology to analyse the inside of the Sun, and