Sea Creatures

Ponsonby’s Curious Compendium

Ivy Press 2015 Hb, 286pp, illus, ind, £12.99, ISBN 9781782402459

The (removable) sticker on this book proclaims that the publishers are ‘Makers of beautiful books’. This one certainly is, as is the companion volume on insects and spiders. The line engravings, some up to 200 years old, obviously cause some issues, as the authors acknowledge: they have corrected names, where necessary, and explain that the taxonomy might have changed since the illustration was published. They usefully explain Linnæan classification for those non-biologists among us. The text is edited to the bone to cram in the maximum of information, but the book does not aim to be a field guide. It is, though, very handsome and (more relevantly for this review) picks up on some decent strange facts about the creatures pictured. Some crabs, for instance, snip poisonous sea anenomes off the rocks and attach them to their shells to repel predators; others clutch them in their claws as a brightly coloured deterrant. The hermaphroditic barnacle fertilises its neighbours “by means of a disproportionately long penis” when not “kicking food into its mouth”. Lobsters sometimes shake their claws off on hearing a sudden noise, according to a Victorian naturalist. A wonderful engraving shows a cuttlefish clinging to a Mr Beale (“a sensation of horror pervaded his whole frame”) after throwing itself at him. The starfish’s powers of regeneration mean that a single arm can regenerate an entire body. And sea cucumbers (a south-east Asian delicacy) entangle predators in a slime; if that doesn’t work, they expel their internal organs.

A useful hint: don’t swim where you see black lugworm casts, which can often indicate sewage discharge.