Marine Microworlds

The reader of this introduction might wonder why the present book, meant to celebrate the beauty of marine life in the Northern Adriatic, its diversity, and a multitude of life habits, begins with a tantrum. The answer is simple: It is necessary. Human intervention in nature is resulting in dramatic biodiversity and habitat loss in vast swaths of the ocean. In these zones, marine life as we know it is currently passing away. Man's global and regional activities have pushed whole ecosystems out of equilibrium, like coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and algal belts. Nature can compensate for slow, natural changes but not the fast, excessive, detrimental impact of the technical civilization established by man - a voracious mass organism, the first species ever that has the power to destroy life on earth since cyanobacteria changed the atmosphere to an oxidizing one about 2.5 billion years ago. For nature, for biodiversity, the sum of human activities from heating the planet to using the ocean as Cloaca maxima to anchoring in a seagrass bed is equivalent to a disastrous meteorite impact or a supervolcano eruption. It leads to a massive die-off of species and communities. When a seagrass bed or an algal forest dies, hundreds of species living in them also will go. And they are wonderful, all of them. How sad if they would go extinct! We, the people who made this book, think these organisms need defense, they need advertisement, they need humans to change into guardians of nature, not its destroyer. If not, mankind in the future might be living in a virtual environment on a dystopic planet from which too many of the wonders of life have been eradicated. This book has been made as a contribution to preventing this nightmare from becoming reality. Maybe we can change our minds from ignorance or pure utilitarianism to respect for the organisms' independent right to exist. Perhaps we change our attitudes from apathy to interest as distant as we can in our own little world, even

Into the black 6Into the blue 7Some basics about the microworlds of the sea floor 8How this book was created 11The sources: benthic algae and plankton 12Porifera - sponges 16Ctenophora - comb jelly fish 32Cnidaria - polyps, sea anemones, corals and jellyfish 34Plathelminthes - turbellarians or flatworms 62Mollusca - snails, slugs, cuttlefish and clams 70Polychaeta - marine ringed worms 138Pycnogonida - sea spiders 162Crustacea - mantis shrimps, decapods, mysids (opossum shrimps), isopods (marine woodlice) and others 164Echinodermata - sea stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, serpent stars and feather stars 226Bryozoa - moss animals 250Tunicata - sea squirts and synascidians 258Teleostei - fish 278Elasmobranchii - sharks and rays 312Epilogue, dedication and acknowledgements 316The photographers' suggestions for further reading 317Species list 318The underwater photographers 320

Dr Roland Meyer is an alumni of the Arthropoda varia workgroup at the Bavarian State collection of Zoology (SNSB-ZSM). He has been a dedicated marine naturalist for many years. His main research and taxonomic interest are Decapoda.