The New Naturalist Library has produced few titles on the seas, and up to now the marine benthos has hardly been touched on. Two classic works produced more than half a century ago were C. M. Yonge’s The Sea Shore (1949) (succeeded by Peter Hayward’s Seashore (2004)) and Sir Alister Hardy’s The Open Sea, published in two volumes. The second volume, Fish and Fisheries (1959), devoted 50 pages to the benthos because of its vital importance to fishes ‘either as their prey or as voracious predators for limited supplies of food’.
Since then human activities have put the integrity of benthic communities at risk but have not diminished their significance for fisheries, and advances in research and techniques have greatly increased our understanding of happenings on the floor of the shallow seas that overlie the continental shelf. Now Peter Hayward extends and updates our understanding of this fascinating habitat, so that for the first time naturalists, even if they are not scuba divers, can begin to appreciate the variety of environments and the diversity of organisms found there. He introduces us to a hitherto mysterious and inaccessible system that is important not only as a source of fish for the table and a sink for rubbish from the land, and as a warning signalling the potential consequences of climate change, but also because it is for most naturalists a new and unfamiliar world that deserves to be widely appreciated and wisely managed.