Within recent years man has become increasingly aware of the disastrous environmental changes that he has introduced, and therefore society is now more concerned about understanding the adaptations organisms have evolved in order to survive and flourish in their environment. Because much of the information pertaining to this subject is scattered in various journals or special symposia proceedings, our purpose in writing this book is to bring together in a college-and graduate-student text the principal concepts of the environmental physiology of the animals that inhabit one of the major realms of the earth, the sea. Our book is not meant to be a definitive treatise on the physiological adap- tation of the animals that inhabit the marine environment. Instead, we have tried to highlight some of the physiological mechanisms through which these animals have been able to meet the challenges of their environment. We have not written this book for anyone particular scientific discipline; rather, we hope that it will have an interdisciplinary appeal.
It is meant to be both a reference text and a text for teaching senior undergraduate and graduate courses in marine biology, physiological ecology of marine animals, and envi- ronmental physiology of marine animals.