For letting me build this aquarium of a book and fill it with so many fish, thank you to everyone at Bloomsbury, especially Anna MacDiarmid and Jim Martin in London who have quietly let me get on with things but have always been there when I need them. Aaron John Gregory, thank you for so brilliantly depicting all the beautiful fish that swim through these pages alongside my words. AJ, you know this book was really just an excuse to work with you again and to tap into our shared fishy obsessions.
To everyone I’ve ever been fish-watching with thank you, for everything you’ve pointed out to me and all those moments we’ve shared. Special thanks to the good folks at the Mole Valley Sub Aqua Club, especially Helena Egerton (former Chicken Number 2, or was it 1?), who helped get me started in this fish-watching business, and to Alice El Kilany for many of my earliest and most fun dives, in Belize, Australia and the Philippines.
From my trips that feature specifically in this book, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Jess Cramp and Kirby Morejohn for the incredible free diving in Rarotonga, to Lori and Pat Colin for sharing fish stories in Palau, and Sarah Frias-Torres for taking me to see Goliath Groupers in Florida. In Fiji, special thanks to Ian Campbell at WWF Pacific for supporting my manta-watching trip, along with Jessamy Ashton for so kindly giving us a place to stay and a car to drive (and for so graciously eating the curry I cooked in the dogs’ dish). My huge thanks also to Heather and Dan Bowling, and all the team at Barefoot Manta Resort in the Yasawas for your wonderfully warm welcome, for introducing me to those beautiful mantas and for arranging the fluorescent night dive. In Borneo, huge thanks to Anna Petherick for being such a fun research assistant; I’m so glad spending all that time with me in windowless hotel rooms and poking around smelly fish markets didn’t put you off being pals with me for so many years since then. You are fab. In Florida, thank you to everyone who welcomed me at Mote Marine Laboratory and especially to Hayley Rutger for arranging my lunch date with Eugenie Clark.
For their indispensable help with my desk-bound research, thank you to Nico Michiels, Ken McNamara and Culum Brown. For reading chapter drafts and putting up with so much fish talk, my huge thanks to everyone at Neuwrite London, especially Emma Bryce, Roma Agrawal, Vanessa Potter, Alice Gregory, Curtis Asante, Christine Dixon, Grace Lindsay and Ed Bracey. Liam Drew, thank you for not pushing the issue of which are better – fish or mammals – and for helping make many parts of this book better than they would have been.
And to all my family and friends, thank you, mainly for being so tolerant of my absence over the last two years, first when I disappeared to chase after fish and then when I came back and shut myself away to write about them. My love and gratitude to my parents, Di and Tom Hendry, especially for standing beside that freezing cold, flooded gravel pit in Leicestershire all those years ago and watching me vanish into the gloomy water, and for supporting me on every watery adventure I’ve been on since. You have always cheered me on, in so many ways. And to stick to literary convention, Ivan, I thank you last of all. Once again you’ve sustained me through another book, as my tireless reader, my storyteller, my quality controller and my fine-wine provider. And you are there, all the way through this book, in the background of so many scenes, when we were watching the same fish and floating through the same seas. Where are we going next?