Ireland's Ocean A natural history

Reviewed by Tom Kennedy on 24 Feb 2009

Most of Ireland lies under the sea, but how many of us would know for sure how many species of octupuses live in Irish waters, or could describe the difference between a cod and a John Dory? The latter, we are informed in a new book Ireland's Ocean, is flat, like a vertical dinner plate.

We still know precious little about our own marine environment, thanks in part to an amazing decline from the robust interest of the mid and late 19th century into a half century of almost complete indifference and neglect. Fortunately we are emerging rapidly from those depths of ignorance, and over the past few years Ireland has been sailing ahead on a voyage of discovery.

As Michael and Ethna Viney explain in this book, a lot of the credit for this revival of interest is due to people such as the geologist Raymond Kearney, whose "rooting around the seashore of Connemara" with quite basic technology, eventually led to the highly sophisticated surveying of the seabed in what amounts to one of the most ambitions scientific projects ever undertaken in Ireland.

The authors, not surprisingly, given their lifetime passion for nature and the environment, have been keeping track of these developments and in this book they blend this knowledge into a fairly comprehensive, yet compact, natural history of the marine environment. As they describe, there are giants, and there are creatures so small that they can only be detected by fluorescence under the microscope. Not that they are insignificant, those self same picoplankton are thought to account for half the photosynthesis in the world's oceans.

We have a lot to learn, not just strange names for unfamiliar fishes, but even defining home territory can be difficult, and with many creatures, such as the curious and well named By-the-wind-sailor, Velella velella, no one is quite sure if it is not just a blow-in. Naturalists, who like to put a name on what they find, will have plenty of examples here to whet the appetite, but I would like to think that describing what's out there between sandy shores and Rockall will be followed up with other books delving deeper into the science behind some of the more extraordinary discoveries being made at sea.

[Price: €29.95 hardback]