A Guide to Common Reef Fishes of the Western Indian Ocean

Well, I’m testing negative again, so back to work I go tomorrow. Thanks to being vaccinated, my symptoms were mild, meaning I failed this COVID test a few days ago... 

 

When I was about 10-12 I was wildlife-nuts. I’d have tons of books about the animal kingdom, and would dip in and out of them whenever I had a spare moment, poring over parrot plumages and engrossed in lions’ hunting habits. I foresaw (inaccurately) a career in zoology. 

But there was something I was struggling to get my hands on. A book about tropical fish, in the wild. My mum told me no such book existed, so she got me a book about keeping tropicals as pets- a good book that I still have. 

Months after this, we were on holiday in possibly the Yorkshire Dales – somewhere as un-tropical as you can get within the UK- and I stumbled upon a little second-hand bookshop. That’s where I found A Guide to Common Reef Fishes of the Western Indian Ocean by K. Bock. I bought it, and there was the inevitable i-told-you-so moment, and I dipped into it on holiday here and there. 

Jump forward to 2022, the world emerging bleary-eyed from a 2-year pandemic, and I’m looking through my shelves for books I still need to read. I dig out this beauty. 

A solidly knowledgable book, Reef Fishes offers concise info on where the tropics are, how the different tidal currents operate and what fish you can expect to see if diving around the reef. It’s hindered by a lack of colour in illustrations, which are important for identification reasons, and a lack of English names for species next to the Latin, but these days these can be Googled. The section on photography and equipment has long since been made redundant after first being published in 1978, and even the reprint in ‘85 is outdated. 

That said, measurements are gratefully metric. There’s good detail on markings on the fish, behaviour, and what kind of habitat you’d more likely find them in.