This book is an interactive multimedia guide to the shallow water invertebrate communities of the Atlantic and Florida Gulf Coasts. It is divided into a series of separate volumes each dealing with a specific invertebrate community. It deals only with those habitats and organisms that students will likely encounter during intertidal and shallow water field trips. These guides incorporate live video footage of invertebrates and habitats along with physical descriptions. It is literally a living reference collection that can be used in conjunction with preserved laboratory specimens. Preserved specimens are needed for proper species identification but by themselves seldom provide a true representation of the actual animal. The interactive format of The Living Seashore will allow the reader to jump quickly from species to species and to control the flow of information.
This guide describes the saltmarsh community and incorporates live video footage of both marsh vegetation and invertebrates. The user will have the option of viewing any of the main marsh regions by simply clicking on low marsh, high marsh or tidal creek and video profiles and descriptions of these regions will then follow. The user can then access the dominant marsh invertebrate groups that are typical of those regions. The user can then click on a species of interest such as the striped sea anemone and live video footage along with detailed descriptions of the organism will follow. Users will feel like they are actually on a saltmarsh rather than having someone merely describe what these habitats are like.
