Anglers treasure the Laguna Madre, a shallow lagoon resting along one hundred miles of the South Texas coast that offers some of the best fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Its lush environment of seagrass meadows, tidal flats, submerged rock, jetties, worm reefs, mangroves, oyster beds, and open bays provides shelter, food, and nursery grounds for more than 100 kinds of fish, and in its upper portion, many popular game fish are at record levels.
In Fishes of the Texas Laguna Madre, longtime angler and fish biologist David A. McKee taps into a lifetime of fishing and studying the lagoon to...

The cold, stygian dark of the extreme sea depths is home to some of our planet's strangest creatures. Even their names evoke a science fiction adventure: dragonfishes, greeneyes, viperfishes, mirrorbellies, lanternfishes. Marine biologist Henry "Hank" Compton (1928-2005) of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's Rockport Marine Lab was present on some of the earliest Gulf of Mexico cruises on which these fishes were collected for the first time in Texas waters.

Upon returning, Compton would retire to the darkroom he had constructed beneath a stairwell at the lab and photograph the...