Price £9.00 (paperback) |
By Tony Martin
Review by Lenni Sykes
This is a coffee table book with a difference. Not only a beautiful book to look at, with spectacular colour photos at every turn of the page, but an informed and up-to-date insight into the lives of whales, dolphins and porpoises. Whale biologist Tony Martin writes in a friendly and accessible style with some fascinating personal anecdotes in addition to taking the reader through the basics of cetacean natural history and biology. One such anecdote tells of an Amazon River dolphin (or boto) mother and calf who swim through the turbid water of the Amazon straight into a fishing net only to emerge a couple of minutes later on the other side. In water with zero visibility this is an impressive display of the sensitivity of the boto's echolocation system which enabled them to locate and safely swim through a small hole in the net. Photos of this rare and rather wonderfully pink dolphin are a real treat contributing to the visual feast that this book provides with the kind of stunning photography throughout that I have come to expect from the publisher Colin Baxter Photography. All this for a mere £9 makes it an ideal gift for any cetacean lover.
