Don't Mess With Me: The Strange Lives of Venomous Sea Creatures
DON'T MESS WITH ME The Strange Lives of Venomous Sea Creatures PAUL ERICKSON Photography by Andrew Martinez TILBURY HOUSE PUBLISHERS THOMASTON MAINE
To Susan life companion adventurer and dive buddy P E To Candace my best friend and wife A M
DON’T BE FOOLED The stinging tentacles of a tube anemone swirl in ocean currents The more than 9,000 varieties of stinging sea jellies anemones and corals look as if they wouldn’t harm a fly ing fish Most of the nearly 3,000 venomous venomous fish species appear anything but dangerous But don’t mess with them That doesn’t mean you need to stay out of the ocean After all we share the land with many more venomous creatures than live in the sea Land-based arthropods alone include more than 40,000 species of spiders most of them venomous plus tens of thousands of stinging bee wasp and ant species yet that doesn’t keep us indoors Still animals evolved first in the oceans and the venomous creatures that swim glide scuttle slither and lurk beneath the waves have had hundreds of millions of years to invent powerful toxins and amazingly clever ways to eat and avoid being eaten
