Planktonic organisms live in a world where viscosity, molecular diffusion, and thermal fluctuations dominate, a world outside the mainstream of ocean physics studies. The task of explaining the properties of this domain has fallen to talented biologists, such as Vogel (1981), Berg (1983), and Denny (1993), who provide intuitive understandings about it. Within the last year, two new books exploring the world of the small have arrived. The first, by Kiørboe (2008), has a strong emphasis on biological interactions, experimental tests, and oceanographic implications. The second, by David Dusenbery, published this year, emphasizes the physical nature of this realm.

Jackson, G. 2009. Review of Living at Micro Scale: The Unexpected Physics of Being Small, by D.B. Dusenbery. Oceanography 22(3):271–272, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2009.91.

Berg, H.C. 1983. Random Walks in Biology. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 164 pp.
1. Denny, M.W. 1993. Air and Water: The Biology and Physics of Life’s Media. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 360 pp.
2. Dusenbery, D.B. 1992. Sensory Ecology: How Organisms Acquire and Respond to Information. W.H. Freeman and Company, 558 pp.
3. Kiørboe, T. 2008. A Mechanistic Approach to Plankton Ecology. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 228 pp.
4. Vogel, S. 1981. Life in Moving Fluids. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 484 pp.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.