A Must-Read "Faces Of The Bakken" From "The Fairfield SunTimes" -- January 8, 2015

A must-read "faces of the Bakken" from The Fairfield Sun Times. I won't do my usual excerpt; because of the way the story is written, doing an excerpt would not do it justice. I assume the link will be lost / broken six months from now. Enjoy!

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A Note for the Granddaughters

Reading

I had a wonderful two weeks -- driving out to California and back. I looked forward to everything: the drive, the scenery, the music, the friends, the restaurants, the museums, our younger daughter and son-in-law, everything.

I didn't get as much reading done as I had hoped, but I did pick up a lot of new books. I continue to read the Brenda James' second book on Shakespeare. I might write more about that later when I finish the book.

One of best books of the many I bought: Spineless: Portraits of marine Invertebrates, the Backbone of Life, Susan Middleton, Amazon, hardcover, c. 2014.

I bought it for our older granddaughter who has an interest in becoming a marine biologist but we leave it at our apartment for a number of reasons. (They and we live in the same apartment complex, and the granddaughters are generally in our apartment every day for as little as fifteen minutes to as long as several hours. They each have a work space/library/crafts area in our little apartment.)

But I digress.

Spineless. Hard cover. Coffee table book. Incredible photos of marine invertebrate life. Scattered throughout the book are several short essays (four to five pages). The common names of all the invertebrates and their Latin names are provided. The full-page photographs (all in color) and the essays end on page 227. Then the "catalogue" begins: 22 pages of one-inch square photos of all the full-page photos and a short narrative of each invertebrate.

To give you an example of the catalogue narrative, here is the entry for "sea stars" (which I grew up calling "starfishes"):

Sea Stars. Hemprich's Sea Star, page 192, Ophidiaster hemprichii

Scale: Diameter 3.5 cm (1.4 in)

Sea stars are a diverse group of predators and scavengers that play important roles in marine ecosystems worldwide. Known to eat everything from mussels and clams to sea anemones and even other sea stars, most have the remarkable ability to turn their stomachs inside out, and extrude them from their mouths. The advantage? The stomach can squeeze into spaces as narrow as one-tenth of a millimeter across (for example, between the two shells of a clam) and begin digesting tissues while it's outside the sea star's body. The sea star then brings the meat, partially broken down, into its body for further digestion and absorption. (Also pages 193 - 195). SEA STAR, Class Asteroidea (p. 192 top right diameter 1 cm/0.4", ....EGYPTIAN SEA STAR, Gomophia egyptiaca .... ; MULTICOLORED LINCKIA, Linckia multiflora ... ; DWARF MOTTLED HENRICIA, Henricia pumilia ... ; PACIFIC BLOOD STAR, Henricia leviuscula ... ; SEA STAR, Crossaster papposus ... ; DWARF MOTTLED HENRICIA and SIX-RAYED SEA STAR, Henricia pumila and Leptasterias hexactis ... ; RED FROMIA STAR, Fromia milleporella ...; MORNING SUN SEA STAR, Solaster dawsoni ...

The catalogue entry for hermit crabs is an entire page of small print and no less than 20 species of hermit crabs are listed. This alone might be worth the price of the entire book for all those children (and some adults) who "collect" hermit crabs when visiting beach locales. 

The book concludes with a two-page narrative by the author describing how she took the photographs and two full pages of small photos of her locations and laboratories.

The book ends with a full page of acknowledgments. The book is published by Abrams in New York City.