Customer Reviews

Snorkeling Guide to Marine Life: Florida, Caribbean, Bahamas

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great book for snorkelers and beginning divers! The color photographs are beautiful and make identification easy. Although this small book is nowhere near as comprehensive as Humann's complete reef identification set, it's a great bargain for those wanting to know the names of most of the common things they see when snorkeling in the Caribbean. The book also contains some valuable pointers about which plants and animals should be approached with caution, how to treat stings, and other interesting facts. It's disappointing that there are so many typos, especially considering that there is relatively little text in the book.

If you dive or snorkel with any regularity, buy the 3-book set by Humann and Deloach. For casual snorkelers or divers, this book will do wonderfully. It's a bit heavy on the fish, so if you are looking for comprehensive invertebrate, algae, or coral guides, look elsewhere. Otherwise, this book will certainly enhance your enjoyment of snorkeling and diving.

Snorkeling Guide to Marine Life is a very handy truncation of three heavy, bulky, but excellent references. There are extraordinary photographs of fish, creatures, and coral taken by noticeable experts. The fish species covered are stunning, and carefully chosen for quality. The others are also amazing and excilirating. A favorite fish species of mine, the Trumpetfish, is included here, shown in a beautiful photograph. Other interesting fish, such as puffers, cowfish, and triggerfish, are also listed. The "Creature Identification" section of the guide is as carefully picked out as the "Fish" ID part. Beautiful crabs, shrimps, and others are shown in nice photos. All make to combine a short, but very helpful field companion.

We used this book daily while snorkeling in Bonaire. Very good pictures and descriptions. Also good descriptions of coral.

This guide is short, but very effective. The book has drawings as well as pictures for fish identification. The drawings point out pertinent points for differentiation between fish and how the fish are classified. The book includes corals and some invertebrates as well. I bought this book before going snorkeling in Key Largo. To my surprise, I identified many of the fish as well as corals in this book. For the value, this book is a great purchase for carribean, florida snorkeling, or scuba diving trips.

After reading the other reviews about this book here on Amazon, I opted to purchase it to accompany me on a 3-week kayaking trip of the outer islands of Belize. I am more or less a novice at tropical snorkeling and at the beginning of the trip, I had no idea who I was sharing my underwater adventures with, but after consulting this book before and after every dive, by the end of the trip I could say "oh, there's a stoplight parrotfish in the intermediate stage" as if I'd known my whole life. Beautiful full-color photos helped greatly with identifying my finned friends and the corals and other creatures they live with. Brief explanations of each of the groups of critters were interesting and educational too. This is definitely not a fully-encompassing guide and probably not for folks who already know most of the plants and animals they are snorkeling with in the Caribbean, but for those who are starting off completely clueless, I *HIGHLY* recommend this book. Both I and my kayaking partner (who grew up in Panama and had been diving with these guys all his life, but never knew who they were!) thoroughly enjoyed learning from this book. I'm back here on Amazon now to purchase the more comprehensive books for our next Caribbean kayaking trip! :) Two thumbs up!

Yes this is a very nice book for identifying marine life. This is from the series of wonderful books by Paul Humann and Ned DeLoach. They did the much more informative Reef Fish ID, Reef Creature ID, and Reef Coral ID. This Snorkeling Guide has many of the same great photos and is very useful if you are satisfied with simply knowing the name of the creature. What is missing are the more extensive notes from the fuller editions; those missing notes tell WHERE the creature is found (e.g., only in the Bahamas, on the Gulf side of Florida, etc.). Also missing is the Reaction to Divers section and the more informative introductions to groups (like Angel Fish, or Wrasses). So, although this is a nice book, it really is a much simplified book for identification. It does not function as a Field Guide (the information on individual creatures is very slight). If you want a comprehensive field guide, this is not the book.

With almost 300 crisp color photographs of the fish, sponges, corals, and other living things in the Caribbean, this is an invaluable guide for the snorkeler or scuba diver. The various wrasses, parrotfish, blennies, angelfish, surgeonfish, as well as groupers, jacks and porgies are illustrated and succinctly described. The names are as colorful as the fish! With this guide you'll know when you've seen a social feather duster, a slippery dick, a moon jelly.

This is an 80-page guide, not exhaustive or complete, but for the vast majority of underwater explorers, it's just the thing. I've been using it for diving and snorkeling in the Florida Keys for over ten years.

Small enough and light weight enough to take along a vacation, and full of good photos and drawings.

I have the entire Reef Collection by these authors and use it after scuba diving. We were only going to be snorkeling in Cozumel, so I brought this more packable book along. But many of the fish, corals & sponges that I observed under water there were NOT in this book. Probably better suited for beginner snorkelers.