'Amphibians' by John Coburn

[Ken Worthington]

Hi, I've just recieved a book that I found on a certain auction site for a modest £2.49 including post.

It's entitled "Amphibians" by John Coborn, and published by T.F.H.

I've read reviews of two of his books (same publisher) on this forum, so I had an idea of what to expect.....

My first thoughts as I opened it were that it had lots of decent colour photographs.
I headed straight for the section on axolotls, where I found two colour photos of a leucistic, one from above and another a close-up of it's face. The captions for these photos described them as albinos! (They were light pink-ish in colour but clearly had black eyes with a hint of blue around the edge.)
The text went on to say that two axololts can live happily in a 24x12x12 inch tank (seems very cramped to me) with 2 inches of medium-grade gravel eek.......I stopped reading at that point and went on to find the section on African Clawed Frogs.....
To read that ACFs have been "successfully introduced to southern California" came as a surprise, as the context would infer that this is a good idea.
It also recommends keeping them at 83*F which seems far too high!!

I haven't read the sections on other amphibians, so I can't really comment.

This book is aimed at beginners and is well illustrated, but I can't trust the information given in it........which is the point of a book......so I think I'll cut-out the pictures and give them to the kids to make a 'collage' from them!

 

[michael]

Hi, I've just recieved a book that I found on a certain auction site for a modest £2.49 including post.



This book is aimed at beginners and is well illustrated, but I can't trust the information given in it........which is the point of a book......so I think I'll cut-out the pictures and give them to the kids to make a 'collage' from them!

That sounds like a great idea. Their are some good TFH books. Many are written by people that never kept the animals they were hired to write about. Many are rewrites of bad information given in other TFH books.

 

[Mac Myers]

Heh... some of them were written 40 years ago.

 

[michael]

Heh... some of them were written 40 years ago.

40 years ago is not that long. I was keeping newts then. A cool book I have a copy of is "Fresh Water Aquaria ..." by Rev. Gregory C. Bateman. It was written in 1890. Reverand Bateman wrote from first hand experience. The book does give some advice that is applicable today.