SCUBA Travel are pleased to release their annual list of the diving best-selling books and DVDs.

Most of the books are either diving area guides – to specific locations or dives around the world – or sea life guides. One breaks the trend though: Simon Pridmore’s Scuba Confidential. This tells readers how to be a better diver.

One DVD makes the list, showing the best diving locations in world.

Here are the top ten: figures in brackets show the previous year’s position.If positions change (and some are very close) this page will update with the new best-sellers.

As you can see, many books continue to be in the top ten year after year. Coral Reef Fishes: Indo-Pacific and Caribbean has not been out of the top ten since we started publishing the list in 2002! But then, it’s a great little book.

The Okeanos is equipped with real-time broadband satellite communications that provide the ship with telepresence -- meaning the video and photos collected with underwater robots known as remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, are shared on the internet in real time. So scientists, teachers, students, and you can watch the dives as they happen. With the ship currently exploring Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, there’s no time like the present to tune in and check out the action.

“But it's so difficult here! The water is only ten feet deep!” It seems that I hear this from about fifty percent of my cave diving students. We train basic cave skills in the open water area of cenotes, where the depth tends to max out at about fifteen feet and we do the skills hovering neutrally buoyant mid-water. The truth is, that pretty much every type of control is more difficult in shallow water, and that is precisely why shallow water makes for such an incredible practice environment – if you can control yourself in shallow water, you can control yourself anywhere.

So grab your fins and head out to the shallow end of the smallest pool you can find, here are five things that you can improve by practicing your diving skill in shallow water.

Feeding sharks for the benefit of divers is becoming more and more common, but is controversial. New research suggests that feeding in areas with several different sharks, over time, leads to one species increasing in numbers at the expense of the others. Published in PLOS ONE⁽¹⁾, the study looked at the Shark Reef Marine Reserve feeding site in Fiji from 2003 to 2012.

Eight species of shark regularly visited the site in 2003: bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas), grey reef shark (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos), whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus), blacktip reef shark (Carcharhinus melanopterus), tawny nurse shark (Nebrius ferrugineus), silvertip shark (Carcharhinus albimarginatus), sicklefin lemon shark (Negaprion acutidens), and tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier). By 2012, there were more individual sharks visiting, but fewer species. The winner was the bull shark. The smaller tawny nurse shark, silvertip shark and sicklefin lemon shark became very rare visitors.