Customer Reviews

Nudibranchs and Sea Snails: Indo-Pacific Field Guide

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Helmut Debelius and his associates filled this book with fantastic underwater photos of live mollusks, which makes viewing the photos almost like making your own extended, and very successful dive trip. However, as a field guide, it suffers from numerous inaccurate ID's, particularly among the shelled mollusks. While some of the animals are misidentified as similar animals, a dozen or so are glaringly incorrect. A lesser problem is that numerous photos had the slides reversed, making many of the shells appear sinistral, or left-handed, when they were in fact dextral shells (or else Helmut found an extremely rare group of previously unknown sinistral specimens, from a number of different genera).

As a coffee table book, this book is wonderful, but I wouldn't recommend paying this much money for a "field guide" if you plan to use it as an identification reference.

I love this book not only for the enormous amount of more than 800 species of snails but also the colours that they have - in fact,I think these are the sea`s most beautifull animals. And I love having a field guide with them in these series,in which I also have some other books mostly with fishes. I thought it should cover only the shell-less snails but it doesn`t. The first half of the book covers the gastropods with a shell,where the cowries and triton shells are among my favourites. The later half covers the more colourfull nudibranchs with their recognizable gills. My favourites are the chromodoris,but also the other ones. And they have all kinds of colours and shapes you can imagine!You can sometimes almost not recognise them as animals from Earth. Well,this book covers them all,making it one of the best in my collection. It covers the area from Red Sea to Carlifornia and is the premiere reference work of it`s kind. A must-have for divers and naturalists.

This invaluable field guide depicts one of the most colorful and remarkable groups of of marine animals. There are over 1000 good quality photo's [ 2 or 3 to each page] of living subjects in their natural habitat all packed into 320 pages. Beside each photo is a text decribing the length, its distribution and general background information on the species. The first third of the book covers shells and the last two thirds nudis. This is an excellent book, the most comprehensive reference for nudibranchs I have seen published. Essential for any scuba diver interested in these beautiful creatures. The author has published six other books on the identification of marine life species around the world, they are all excellent.

A beautiful book containing over 1020 color photos

depicting gastropods from the West Coast of the US to the Red Sea to South Africa. Half of the book is devoted to gastropods with shells and half of the book concerned with those without shells(nudibranchs) all live and in their natural habitat. There is nothing so brightly colored as a nudibrarch and to see one "swim" is pure joy. A must have for divers, aquarists and those who love nature. Although there is some animals misidentified I find it still a good field guide and should be well received by anyone who appreciates beauty.