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Illustrations play an integral role in the work of taxonomists, and they lend a depth, beauty, and sometimes pure romanticism to the volumes containing them. Case in point: this week’s book of the week, Our Country’s Fishes and How to Know Them: A Guide to all the Fishes of Great Britain (1902) by W.J. Gordon. This charming book contains over 30 plates illustrating the myriad of ichthyoids found in Great Britain. Furthermore, the lists of these fish are itemized according to their local and popular names. As the author points out, the purpose of this volume is the “ready identification of our native species, whether sea-water, fresh-water, or estuarine…[and] as the number of species found in British waters is not large, space has been found for a series of short notes…” So, take a few moments to look through the colorful plates depicting the many and varied species of fish found in Great Britain, and feel free to keep a copy of these illustrations for yourself by downloading high resolution images of these pages by clicking on the “Download Images” options found in the drop down menu entitled “Download/About This Book” when on the page viewer screen. Enjoy!

We have recently updated BHL to allow us to better handle situations where titles or items are taken offline. The key problem that occurs when things are taken offline is that the links to those items are now broken. Anyone who has linked to those titles/items or uses our data exports and/or APIs to access them is affected.

For this week’s book of the week, we highlight another of EOL’s featured species – Sepia apama, perhaps better-known as the Australian Giant Cuttlefish. With a maximum recorded mantle length of 520 mm and a weight of 6.2 kg, the Sepia apama is the largest species of cuttlefish in the world.

New updates have been released for the BHL API, plus new documentation about data exports and other services are now available on the Developer Tools and API section of the BHL wiki.

As part of our on-going series related to the International Year of Biodiversity, we’ll take a closer look at conservation status and occasionally highlight species in each rank. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources is the primary global organization responsible for risk assessment organizes threat in 8 categories–Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Conservation Dependent, near Threatened, and Least Concerned.

Spring is in the air, and that means blooms are just around the corner! And this, of course, means that all you gardeners out there can dig your potting tools out of the shed and get ready to get your hands dirty. We thought we’d help by highlighting one of the many valuable gardening guides in our collection. As we sifted through our collection, one book in particular caught our eye.