United States
£ GBP
Marine Shells of the Whitsunday Coast and Islands covers about 600 species of gastropods and 350 species of bivalves that are individually illustrated with high quality photographs accompanying the detailed descriptions. Marine Shells of the Whitsunday Coast and Islands seeks to provide a comprehensive survey of the species that are likely to be seen by shell enthusiasts visiting the Whitsunday region of Queensland, while recognizing that such a list will always be incomplete. The provenance of all the species included has been carefully checked, and each is accompanied with notes regarding size variation, frequency, habitat and distribution in this part of Queensland within the limitation of the data available to the author. Multiple specimens were photographed of highly variable species. A fair number of micro shells (3-10 mm) have been included and their images magnified to aid identification.
While Marine Shells of the Whitsunday Coast and Islands deliberately focuses on a limited section of the Queensland coast, many of the species have a wide distribution within the Indo-Pacific region and some within other regions like the South Australian. Few books have been published which include sections on both the gastropods and the bivalves. This is essentially an identification guide, and hopefully a useful account of the marine molluscan fauna of the area. The provision of a current system of classification as a framework for Marine Shells of the Whitsunday Coast and Islands has proved to be a great challenge, at a time when so many revisions are taking place. The author has consequently chosen to include two systems, for both the gastropods and the bivalves. The first, in each case will be familiar to many, while the second is a more recently published system, developed from an improved understanding of patterns of relationships determined by studies in molecular biology.
