Product Description

600 different Indo-Pacific marine species fully described in detail with fascinating, first-hand information on distribution, habitat, size, life habits, underwater photography tips, full indexes and more than 800 spectacular photos. The essential field guide for all serious macro divers from the Maldives to Australia.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #673292 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 468 pages

Review
"...best work I've yet seen. For...Mabul or Kunkungan, this book should be as necessary as a passport." -- Back Chatter - August 2003 edition by Ryan Boereme

"...well written, quite informative, beautifully illustrated...a priced right, quality publication. Get a copy, you'll be happy you did!" -- FAMA Magazine

"Illusrated with more than 800 extraordinary colour photos...this is the field guide of choice for all serious macro divers." -- Asian Diver December/January 2004 issue

"The photography is impressive...if you need to identify any species from this area...this guide is a gem." -- Northern California Underwater Photographic Society

"We just discovered the ultimate guide to Indo-Pacific macro life (...) this book is a must for traveling divers" -- Undercurrent, The Editor's Picks, January 2004

600 marine species illustrated with spectacular photos and a compact text for a very useful and much needed underwater guide. -- TAUCHEN Magazine, Germany, December 2003

Both a macro and a fish field guide for all serious divers from the Maldives to Australia. A must! -- Four Lakes Scuba Club Newsletter, February 2004

Colour photographs of the highest quality make it easy to identify what you have seen...An essential tool for anyone. -- DIVER Magazine, UK, June 2004

Identifies and describes 600 small marine species from the Indo-Pacific...Clear, concise, informative... packed with more than 800 colour photos -- BBC Wildlife Magazine, January 2004

This book stands out for the beautiful photography...showing local variations of species. Compact size, publishing of excellent quality. -- whiteheadimages.com, May 2006

About the Author
World-famous marine photographers and nature writers, Andrea and Antonella Ferrari have published several photographic books and hundreds of magazine articles on travel and marine life. Their books - which have been successfully published in Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Great Britain, the United States of America, Malaysia and Japan - include the best-selling "Malaysia Diving Guide" (1997)and its companion volume "Malaysia - An Underwater Paradise" (1998), the sophisticated photobooks "Layang Layang - The Island of Dreams Come True" (1998)and "Top Nature and Dive Resorts of Borneo" (2001) and the extraordinarily successful "Reef Life" (1999) and "Sharks" (2000) nature guides.

Customer Reviews

A SURE WINNER WITH MUCK DIVERS AND CRITTER LOVERS
This is a spectacular book, and a very useful one for every self-respecting Indo-Pacific muck diver and macro critter lover. For ANY diver, in fact. On the cover it curiously says "Underwater Malaysia" But the inside actually covers a much broader area, from the Eastern Indian Ocean to the Western Pacific, so it's really helpful also if you're diving Thailand, Indonesia, Borneo, the Philippines, PNG or even parts of Australia. I believe this is the first diving ID guidebook entirely dedicated to small Indo-Pacific reef animals (ie those incredibly colorful clownfish, gobies, cleaner shrimps, nudibranchs and the like) - and what a winner it is! What makes it unique for me is the number of rare reef species featured and the amazing color photographs. I discovered a lot of new interesting facts reading the species' descriptions, which are very informative, pleasantly written and often quite amusing, and the reproduction quality of the photos is, wow!, absolutely stunning. Some of the critters (look at those unbelievable flamboyant cuttlefish or the mating mandarinfish) seem to be about to jump out of the page! As guidebooks go, this one is a bit heavier than one would expect, but it is also quite small and easy to carry around on a boat or in a dive bag, and despite being a paperback and not a hardcover the binding looks like it will be able to take quite a beating (travelling scuba divers will know what I'm talking about here). I'm sure as an identification guide this great book can be equally useful to the marine biologist and the advanced aquarist, but as a whole it's obviously geared towards those actually diving and taking photographs in tropical waters. OK, all this does not come real cheap - but in my opinion, considering the quality of the photos and the huge amount of information in it, this book is worth its price to the last dime.

MUST HAVE!!!
Amazing photography!!! Great ID book on macro reef inhabitants! Always with me on my dive trips... no regrets ;p

A FANTASTIC BOOK FOR DIVERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
I bought this book some time ago while on a diving trip to Borneo and immediately fell in love with it. This is the guidebook every discerning macro diver has been waiting for! After a long introduction and a funny, informative chapter on "the fine art of macrophotography" the authors describe in full detail more than 600 different marine species, ranging from invertebrates (nudibranchs, crustaceans and mollusks) to small and not-so-small fish. Every species entry features full, first-hand information on size, habitat, geographical range and life habits, and the book is chock-full with hundreds of absolutely stunning color pictures of the critters. Despite its restrictive title, the contents are in fact perfectly useful for any Indo-Pacific dive site, ranging from the Maldives to Papua New Guinea and Northern Australia. Some of the animals described are absolutely weird and are a fascinating first even for seasoned muck divers like myself. I cannot have enough praise for this book - it is an absolute must for any serious muck diver or underwater photographer, and it fills to perfection an important void in the diving guidebooks panorama. It's also quite compact and very well bound. From now on I won't take another dive trip without taking it along - bravo!