A Field Guide to Coastal Fishes of Bermuda, Bahamas, and the Caribbean Sea Paperback – October 25, 2022

This book is awesome, 100% recommend.

Kells did a great job, again!! This book has great taxonomic coverage! of various fish taxa!Beautiful illustrations in color and informative text make this book, in my opinion, a must have for any fish taxonomist and naturalist.Nothing to dislike .

Speaking as a rookie angler, I'm a huge fan of author/illustrator Val Kells' "Field Guide" series of ichthyology books. I purchased all three of her "Field Guide" books to help me improve as a fisherman. I'm hoping she writes a Field Guide for Hawaii sometime, that way almost the entire USA territory is covered.Unfortunately Val's publisher -- Johns Hopkins -- is ruining the prints. Immediately check your books for major printing errors: I had to return my first copy of "Bermuda, Bahamas, and the Caribbean Sea" because fourteen pages were misprinted. Several pages were severely misprinted. Used my Amazon Prime to immediately return this copy for a different one; the refund process took over a month. That's a totally unacceptable experience for an Amazon Prime member.Look carefully at the first picture I uploaded for this review and you'll see the entire rear cover of "Alaska to California" is misprinted: the pattern is rotated incorrectly several degrees clockwise, almost cutting off some of the text at bottom-left. This same problem occurs in many pages of all these books.The third picture I uploaded is page 332 of "Alaska to California" and you can see that: a) the entire page is incorrectly rotated several degrees clockwise, b) the page number itself is cut off, and c) several of the paragraphs are cut off on their left sides. Again, this is a problem across all three books that I have.Another printing problem I tried to photograph but couldn't because my cell phone camera is poor: strange blue/red shadowing of the words "FEATURES" & "HABITAT." Look at Picture 3 again and you'll see "FEATURES" and "HABITAT" in each description-paragraph for each fish. These words should be capitalized and printed in baby blue on a white background. However, many pages show these words double stamped, printed in baby blue, but with a strange red shadow behind each letter. It's almost like you're reading the book while wearing those old fashioned, blue-and-red 3D glasses.All of these awful printing errors aside, the content of these books is absolutely phenomenal. I could not find a better reference guide for identifying fish. The drawings of the fish are beautiful and true-to-life; I know because I'll watch YouTube fishing shows and compare the fish on camera with Val's drawing of the same fish in her books. The written descriptions and pictures are accurate. Val goes above-and-beyond by also including concise descriptions of fish families at the beginning of each book, which is hugely helpful. Even if you cannot identify the exact species you just caught, you will learn to recognize your catch generically as a "jack," "snapper," "scorpionfish", "tuna," etc. That is good enough for most beer-swilling and cigar-chomping fishermen like myself.Be aware that some fish look different when they are alive versus when they are dead, and some fish even make substantial color changes when they are alive. Mahi-mahi appear silvery-blue when they are dead, or when they're alive, or yellowish-green when they are alive or for a short period of time after they're dead. Obviously a single book cannot contain all of these color variations, so you must learn these by experience or further study.Purchase all three books. As long as they are printed correctly, you won't regret it.

Photos are nice while covering a large quantity of species

As an aquarium aficionado I really enjoy this book

wunderschöne Abbildungen der Fische in großem Format.