AUTHOR, AUTHOR, AUTHOR : Scales : Something--in fact, everything--is fishy in Robin Love’s ‘Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast.’

Here it is, fall in Ventura County, that ripest of times for apples, lemons, kiwi fruits, pumpkins, pomegranates, artichokes, avocados, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, mushrooms, spinach, squash and new books.

Yes, new books. Three writers from this area have been cultivating new projects, and their works make a strange new crop.

“Jacob’s Journey” is a contemplative novel by Noah benShea, the erstwhile leader of a Carpinteria bagel company. The author is expected to speak at 6 p.m. Friday in the Ventura Bookstore in Ventura.

“Tricks of the Trade” is a paperback collection of practical and impractical advice (subjects include checkers and bullfighting; advisers include Chevy Chase and Kareem Abdul Jabbar), all gathered by Jerry Dunn of Ojai.

And “Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast” is just that--an exhaustive yet goofy guide by UC Santa Barbara researcher Robin Milton Love. At the Channel Islands National Park office in Ventura, rangers say the book is the best available guide to fish off this county’s coastline.

Here, Ventura County Life offers a closer inspection of the books and their authors.

Only a certain kind of person kids about ichthyology. Robin Milton Love, doctor of zoology, holder of government grants and now a self-published author, is that kind.

He kids in his office at the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara, comparing Garibaldi to “psychotic little gangsters.”

He kids in the pages of Natural History and Ocean Realm magazines, musing on the reproductive habits of the starfish and warning of biologists, like himself, who discuss fecal parasites over dinner.

And now he’s kidding in bookstores and aquariums all along the West Coast. In his boldest act of unserious ichthyology so far, Love has written a book titled “Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast.”

“Probably More,” a 215-page illustrated guide to this coast’s fish, is Love’s fourth book. It is sufficiently thick with information that Gary E. Davis, research marine biologist for Channel Islands National Park, says it’s probably the best available guide to the fish off Ventura County’s coast.

The book is also self-published, leaving the author editorless in his effort to unite fish facts and frivolity in a sort of spear-gun marriage.

The concept, says Love, was “to break down the conventional barriers that books have. The idea is that, if you’re a humor book, you’re a humor book, and if you’re a factual book, you’re a factual book. So I played with that.”

On Page 17, he notes that in most migrations of the Pacific lamprey, “the fish make short bursts upstream, then suck onto rocks with their mouths while they rest and remind themselves that sex is worth it.”

On Page 75, he reports that by state law, grunion fishing “must be conducted entirely with hands. . . . Of course, if you were a real man or woman, you would use your mouth.”

On Page 165, after writing that wolf eels are gray, brown or greenish, with dark spots, he adds: “Oh, yes, the adult males have white, lumpy, sort of misshapen heads and look like the title characters in ‘Chainsaw Flesh Eaters from the Planet of Mutant Savings and Loan Executives.’ ”

Along the way, readers encounter the Pacifichagfish, the plainfin midshipman, the longjaw mudsucker and the author’s personal favorite, the sarcastic fringehead, which dwells in beer containers on the ocean floor off Santa Monica, among other places.

“They get to be about seven inches long, and about half of their body is head,” says Love. “They just bite anything. . . . If they were three feet long, no one would go in the water.”

The book is not for those seeking only the facts. Nor was it one for Times book reviewer Charles Solomon, who found Love’s humor “regrettable” and “painfully unfunny,” and compared reading the book to “walking though a fetid pool on stepping stones: The trick is to jump from fact to fact, without falling into the ‘comic’ miasma.” (Love clipped out the review, highlighted the choicest words, and posted it on his office door.)

But the author can claim the praise of such credential-bearing admirers as Jean-Michel Cousteau, executive vice president of the Cousteau Society in Los Angeles, and a longtime friend of Love’s.

Love’s sense of humor, says Cousteau, is “probably something which not everybody likes. But I’ve experienced Milton Love at work, and because of the humor he introduces, he has gotten things across to a lot of my students. . . . It’s education for entertainment, and it’s what we need to do more and more. So I think he is on the right track.

“Scientists are often unbelievably boring people,” adds Cousteau. “And somebody has to come along and help them out.”

Love grew up in Los Angeles and became interested in fish after his father took him fishing when he was 5. He went on to earn bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at UC Santa Barbara, writing his dissertation on the life of the olive rockfish.

He taught at UCSB for three years and for more than a decade has worked with students through Cousteau Society programs. Love says he enjoys the interaction, but he would rather communicate on a grander scale--through video, for instance, or books.

In the meantime, he does research. Love’s largest current project is part of a federally funded study of fish surrounding a Point Arguello oil platform. “The reality is that I’m a pretty good scientist,” says Love, “but not a heroic one.”

The first edition of “Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast” is 3,500 quality paperback copies, priced at $12.95 each. Copies can be ordered through the Really Big Press, P.O. Box 60123, Santa Barbara 93160.

How smart are fish?

Good question. Let’s say you’ve got yourself, oh, 10,000 mice and you run them through all sorts of mouse exams. You put them in mazes, you give them little mouse IQ tests (complete with itsy-bitsy “No. 2 pencils”), you run them through the whole enchilada. And out of those 10,000 mice, you find the most stupid mouse, the one that can barely get out of its own way. That mouse, a mouse which probably still believes we can win a land war in Asia, that mouse is smarter than any fish that ever lived.

--From “Probably More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast”