What Is Viva Natura?

Viva Natura is a long-term natural history project documenting Mexico's landscapes and biodiversity through field observation, photography, and writing. Created by Petr Myska in 2001, it has grown into a body of work that includes bilingual field guides, documentary film contributions, and exploration-based storytelling. It's most useful to you if you're a diver, student, or nature explorer looking for practical, photo-rich identification guides to Mexican wildlife—especially the marine and terrestrial species of the country's Pacific side.

What the project actually is

Viva Natura isn't a travel operator, a conservation NGO, or a general wildlife blog. It's a personal, observation-driven documentation project. The work is grounded in direct fieldwork: the author photographs animals in the wild and writes identification guidance from those encounters. That matters because the guides are built around what you'd realistically see in the field, not just museum specimens or secondhand records.

The project's scope has widened over two decades beyond books into documentary filmmaking, broadcast contributions, and international publications.

What's published and what's coming

The available volume covers amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals of Western Mexico, with practical field guidance aimed at an accessible introduction to the region's wildlife. The upcoming marine guide is aimed squarely at divers, students, and ocean explorers, covering reef fish, corals, sharks, rays, crustaceans, nudibranchs, and other marine animals.

Both are described as bilingual, which is a meaningful detail if you're working across English- and Spanish-speaking contexts—research, guiding, or study.

Ecosystems covered

The site organizes its subject matter by ecosystem, which is a useful way to check whether your destination is included:

• Mexican Pacific — coastal reefs, rocky shores, and beaches of Western Mexico (marine)
• Pacific Forests — seasonal tropical forests of Mexico's Pacific lowlands (terrestrial)
• Pacific Islands — remote volcanic islands of the Revillagigedo in the Eastern Tropical Pacific

If your interest is the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean side, or inland regions outside the Pacific lowlands, this project's coverage is not aimed there.

Field journals and media

Beyond the books, Viva Natura publishes field journals and has contributed to external outlets, including National Geographic field notes on Mexican Tropical Pacific and Salish Sea explorations, and Oceanographic Magazine. On the film side, Touch of the Blue Crocodile (2012) involved production, camera, graphics, and translation work and was broadcast nationally by Česká televize (Czech National TV).

These are worth knowing about if you want a sense of the project's observational style before buying a guide—the journals show how the fieldwork translates into narrative.

How to decide if it's for you

Choose Viva Natura if:

• You need a photographic identification guide to Western Mexico's terrestrial wildlife, or (from mid-2026) the marine life of the Mexican Tropical Pacific.
• You want bilingual material.
• You value guides built from the author's own wild photography rather than compiled imagery.

Look elsewhere if:

• Your region of interest is outside Mexico's Pacific side.
• You need a general travel or trip-planning resource rather than species identification.

To get notified when the marine guide is released, the site offers an email registration that it describes as a one-time publication notice—no newsletters or marketing emails. The available terrestrial guide can be found in select local bookstores or as an ebook via Amazon Kindle and Google Books.