Seals & Sea Lions: A Portrait of the Animal World (Portraits of the Animal World)

Rating:
Summary: Manatees are NOT Pinnipeds!
Review: From the title, it appears that this book is supposed to be strictly about animals of the order "Pinnipedia," that is, animals that are flipper-footed. This order includes the true seals, sea lions, and walruses. The book starts off well enough with beautiful photographs and good descriptive text, but on page 63, Cleave inexplicably groups walruses and manatees together as if manatees also belong to this order. Manatees, while bearing perhaps a slight resemblance to walruses, are of the order "Sirenia" (manatees and dugongs) which are actually more closely related to elephants than to any marine mammal. Furthermore, while pinnipeds are piscivorous (fish-eating) and can spend part of their lives out of the water (i.e., on land or ice), manatees are herbivores and totally aquatic. The author does not point out these distinctions and thus this chapter is very misleading. Hopefully this will be remedied in any further printing of this book; in the meantime, anyone using this book as a reference should keep this in mind (indeed much more authoritative sources should be used instead such as Marianne Riedman's book "The Pinnipeds" or "The Sierra Club Handbook of Seals and Sirenians" by Reeves, et al).

Rating:
Summary: Manatees are NOT Pinnipeds!
Review: From the title, it appears that this book is supposed to be strictly about animals of the order "Pinnipedia," that is, animals that are flipper-footed. This order includes the true seals, sea lions, and walruses. The book starts off well enough with beautiful photographs and good descriptive text, but on page 63, Cleave inexplicably groups walruses and manatees together as if manatees also belong to this order. Manatees, while bearing perhaps a slight resemblance to walruses, are of the order "Sirenia" (manatees and dugongs) which are actually more closely related to elephants than to any marine mammal. Furthermore, while pinnipeds are piscivorous (fish-eating) and can spend part of their lives out of the water (i.e., on land or ice), manatees are herbivores and totally aquatic. The author does not point out these distinctions and thus this chapter is very misleading. Hopefully this will be remedied in any further printing of this book; in the meantime, anyone using this book as a reference should keep this in mind (indeed much more authoritative sources should be used instead such as Marianne Riedman's book "The Pinnipeds" or "The Sierra Club Handbook of Seals and Sirenians" by Reeves, et al).