Beach-Spawning Fishes: Reproduction in an Endangered Ecosystem

"Beach-Spawning Fishes covers the wide range of questions one might immediately ask: Is this behavior convergent or limited to a certain family? Which taxa behave like this? What are the habitat requirements? These questions and more are readily answered in the first two chapters of the book. Spawning in the intertidal zone is not limited to the night-time activities of the California Grunion, but to multiple families of teleost fishes. From a general background on overall behavior and evolution of this unique life-history trend, the book then moves from overall patterns of diversification to specific cases of beach-spawning behavior. Just as beach-spawning behavior is diverse across multiple fish families, the reproductive behaviors are highly varied as well as the preferred habitats. In this book, we see beach spawners make use of multiple reproductive strategies with an added twist of doing this all in low or receding waters. Running the gamut from evolution, physiology, life history, and conservation, Beach-Spawning Fishes is an excellent resource for your bookshelf. Just as the many chapters of this book cover diverse questions with regard to beach spawners, the ways in which this resource can be used are diverse as well. Beach-Spawning Fishes has many possible uses for education at the undergraduate, graduate, or professional level. This book is an excellent resource for a professor wanting to bring a textbook-based, in-depth focus on unique spawning strategies in fishes, and it could certainly stand alone as a textbook for a special topics course on marine fish behavior. Beach-Spawning Fishes would be a useful supplement to a reproduction chapter in an ichthyology class or a jumping off point for discussions on diversity and convergent evolution. Anatomy and physiology courses could benefit from the real-life examples of physiological processes discussed. Other portions of this book could be summarized for ecology courses as examples of food webs, ecosystem functionality, or embryonic development. As an extra bonus, this book comes in hardcover, and is also available as an ebook, further lending it to class-based use." —Malorie M. Hayes, Auburn University, in Copeia