Returning to Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez

In 1940, author John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts chartered a fishing boat named the Western Flyer to explore the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. The book they co-authored, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), included a catalog of the more than 550 species found.

Flash forward sixty-four years. Sea of Cortez was used as a “non-traditional dataset” by Raphael D. Sagarin, William F. Gilly, Charles H. Baxter, Nancy Burnett, and...