FARMING THE SEA

Mr. McKee is a historian and writer by profession, and a diver by serious avocation who has explored the waters near the ""Isle of Wight cutoff""--a kind of invisible frontier which marks an abrupt change in underwater environment. But this is not the only change and McKee makes a strong point that the ocean is extraordinarily varied ecologically speaking, even when examined in small doses. Unless this is taken into account a fair amount of the pure laboratory tank or pond research popular today may be wasted effort. Read this book for fresh, often first-hand accounts of exploring wrecks, experimenting with artificial reefs (old auto bodies became the teeming apartments for fish off Malibu until the metal corroded), for accounts of farming lobster and shrimp (first you have to be able to recognize a pregnant shrimp), for oyster-bedding, pearl growing, cod- and trout-raising, for the newly discovered virtues of those symbiotic cleaning fish, and for reports on a variety of other successful and unsuccessful attempts to reap sea harvests off the coasts of Japan, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and North America. Read it also to debunk some divine myths: very little of the sea is like those clear-blue still lifes photographed off the Bahamas or in the Mediterranean. The real depths are cold, turbid and nearly black. Real divers grope, depending on skin and ear sensations, rarely ever able to use their eyes.