Otolith Atlas of Marine Fishes of Southern Africa and Adjacent Oceans

Second Edition – expanded

By Malcolm J Smale and Gillian Watson

Size: 210x 297 mm

Pages: 696 pages

ISBN 13: 978-1-991458-02-5

Published: December 2024

Publishers: NISC (Pty) Ltd

Recommended Retail Price: R485.00 inc. VAT

Cover: Paperback

Description
Author Bio(s)
Table of Contents
Ordering Information

About the book

In this new edition, the Otolith Atlas of Marine Fishes of Southern Africa and Adjacent Oceans, authors Malcolm J Smale and Gillian Watson have expanded the coverage of the original benchmark work by Smale, Watson and Hecht (1995) to include almost double the number of species across a wider geographic area.

The 1 600 species whose otoliths are described here include not only fishes of the coastal waters of southern Africa but from farther afield, such as in the eastern Atlantic, western Indian Ocean and Southern Ocean. Detailed descriptions are supported by more than 4 000 scanning electron microscope images of individual whole otoliths, giving the reader easy access to otherwise fragile, rare or inaccessible reference material housed in local museum fish collections.

The Atlas will facilitate correct otolith identification, which plays a critical role in revealing predator–prey relationships, and allows for enumeration of the number, species and size of fish prey in stomach contents, scats or other prey remains. The authors of the Atlas have tabulated 782 length–length and length–mass regressions of 225 species, allowing researchers to calculate prey length and prey mass from measurements of otoliths obtained from stomach contents or middens. The often species-specific nature of otolith shapes or their similarity across members of the same genus or family, in both recent and extinct taxa, makes otoliths a useful tool in palaeoichthyology and the phylogenetic classification of bony fishes, including the discernment of species complexes. The descriptions and illustrations in the Atlas present copious reference material in this regard.

This Atlas constitutes an invaluable resource for fish species identification from otoliths by providing an innovative tool for ichthyologists and archaeologists, as well as fisheries scientists, ornithologists and mammalogists researching trophic interactions in marine and estuarine ecosystems. To facilitate access to the important information presented in this Atlas, the text, micrographs and regressions in this book are also available free for download from the publisher’s website.

Reviewers of the first edition said....
“For those studying fish predators or the paleontology of fishes off southern Africa, this atlas is a wealth of information. It is an overwhelming achievement considering the time and effort involved in describing, photographing, and measuring the number of specimens included in this atlas. Scanning through the plates was a treat...
JT Harvey and MM Yoklavich [published in Copeia, 1996(4), 1061–1063. https://doi.org/10.2307/1447685OTOLITH]

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE BOOK BELOW

Otolith Atlas TEXT only
Pages from Otolith Atlas PLATES 1-100
Pages from Otolith Atlas PLATES 101-200
Pages from Otolith Atlas PLATES 201_286

About the Authors

Malcolm J Smale is an accomplished marine biologist who has researched a number of marine taxa during a career of more than 45 years. He took up a post at the Port Elizabeth Museum at Bayworld as a researcher and curator of the fish otolith and cephalopod beak collections. These collections became central to his studies of trophic relationships in several marine apex predators. He participated in numerous research cruises along the east and west coasts of South Africa, and collaborated in fish surveys at numerous islands in the western Indian Ocean, alongside colleagues from the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity and other research institutions, often in efforts to build local fish collections. He is a qualified scientific diver and dive supervisor, which has facilitated his fish collecting work. He has contributed to more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and 30 book chapters, reviews or popular articles. He is Director and Chair of the Bayworld Centre for Research and Education in Gqeberha, South Africa, and has served on the Management Committee of the Institute for Coastal and Marine Research at Nelson Mandela University.

Gillian Watson obtained a BSc (Hons) degree from the University of Rhodesia. She then taught science at St Andrews International High School in Blantyre, Malawi. After emigrating to South Africa she took up a contract post at the Port Elizabeth Museum at Bayworld to work on the fish otolith collection in preparation of the Otolith Atlas of Southern African Marine Fishes (Smale et al. 1995). Following this she obtained an MSc degree from the University of Port Elizabeth by studying the shark species Squalus megalops. She eventually became the Collections Manager at the Port Elizabeth Museum at Bayworld, helping to organise the natural history collections in herpetology, marine mammals and marine biology—including the otolith and cephalopod beak collections. She processed the new otoliths and did the micrograph imaging for both Atlases. Working with the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity and other research institutions housing voucher fish specimens, she linked the assembled otoliths to the original fish in as many cases as possible.