The Open Sea

The New Naturalist editors believe this to be the greatest general work on the subject ever written. This edition is exclusive to newnaturalists.com

Professor Alistair Hardy is truly obsessed by animals of the sea – devotedly enthusiastic about the nature of their adaptations and life histories, brilliantly critical in the examination of their mysteries, acutely lucid (and at the same time highly artistic) in his descriptions of them in his arresting plates.

To describe the relatively unknown and mysterious world of plankton is a task that the greatest of marine zoologists might boggle at. Yet the plankton is to the sea what vegetation is to the land. The study of plankton is a complex discipline which few amateur naturalists have had the privilege to enjoy. Never before has such a synthesis of knowledge been attempted in a community of animals so mysterious, yet so important. Professor Hardy has grasped this problem in a new and exciting way; and at least the common reader can discern the pattern of life that dominates two-thirds of the world’s surface.

About the author

(1896–1985) A marine biologist and religious thinker, Hardy spent much of the 1920s afloat studying herring food in the North Sea. An Oxford graduate, Hardy was the resident zoologist on the Discovery expedition to the southern seas from 1925 to 1927. Successively he was Professor of Zoology at Hull (1928–42), Aberdeen (1942–5) and Linacre Professor at Oxford (1942–61). FRS (1940), knighted 1957. A gifted writer and watercolourist, he was ‘at heart a wide-ranging Victorian naturalist’.