This book is a comprehensive guide to the identification of 800 species of decapod and stomatopod crustaceans from southern Australian marine waters. It is liberally illustrated with more than 1000 line drawings giving good views of many species as well as diagnostic illustrations. Details for each species include the authority, year of description, sometimes a common name, diagnosis, size, geographical distribution, and ecological and depth distribution. The chapter on the Stomatopoda is by Shane Ahyong. Sections within each chapter are hierarchical, species within genera, within families (often with subfamilies as well). Identification is achieved through the use of dichotomous keys adapted from many originally published in the primary literature, or developed from scratch. Some keys are to all Australian taxa but most are to southern Australian taxa only. The information in this book derives from over 200 years of collecting in southern Australian environments, from the intertidal to the deep sea, and publications in numerous journals in several languages. More than 800 of these papers and books are cited. Winner of the 2005 Whitley Award for Systematics.

The published works are derived from the Zoological catalogue of Australia database. Taxa in the Australian fauna are divided among volumes to form sets of about 1800-2000 species available names, such that each volume comprises the whole or part of one or more major groups.

Life began in the sea, and even today most of the deep diversity of the planet is marine. This is often forgotten, especially in tropical countries like Costa Rica, renowned for their rain forests and the multitude of life forms found therein. Thus this book focusing on marine diversity of Costa Rica is particularly welcome. How many marine species are there in Costa Rica? The authors report a total of 6,777 species, or 3. 5% of the world’s total. Yet the vast majority of marine species have yet to be formally described. Recent estimates of the numbers of species on coral reefs range from 1–9 million, so that the true number of marine species in Costa Rica is certainly far higher. In some groups the numbers are likely to be vastly higher because to date they have been so little studied. Only one species of nematode is reported, despite the fact that it has been said that nematodes are the most diverse of all marine groups. In better studied groups such as mollusks and crustaceans, reported numbers are in the thousands, but even in these groups many species remain to be described. Indeed the task of describing marine species is daunting – if there really are about 9 million marine species and Costa Rica has 3. 5% of them, then the total number would be over 300,000. Clearly, so much remains to be done that new approaches are needed. Genetic methods have en- mous promise in this regard.