Life Between the Tides: In Search of Rockpools and Other Adventures Along the Shore

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swimming, sunbathing, playing games, going for a walk, having picnics, lighting fires and cooking food, gathering shellfish (except mussels and oysters, to which the Crown retains the rights), fishing (except salmon, ditto) and shooting wildfowl (as long as they are over the foreshore when shot), embarking, disembarking, loading and unloading a boat, drying nets, gathering bait and making sandcastles.

It felt, as all good places feel, hidden from the world, enormous and strangely private. The bay looked out to the south, to the hills in Mull. To the south-east, seven miles away, the single white finger of the lighthouse on Lismore. Behind it, the hills above Oban. I found this book phenomenal, so much more than I had hoped. It's so accessible, fairly easy to understand, yet presents new information along with some I have been exposed to before, but in new, entertaining ways. The moon’s tidal force has a much greater effect on the surface of the ocean, of course. Water is liquid and can respond to gravity more dramatically. Evocative . . . [Nicolson’s] wonder is infectious, and he makes a convincing case that to better understand the sea, people must pay more attention . . . As poetic as it is enlightening, [ Life Between the Tides ] is tough to put down." — Publishers WeeklyMany of the beaches in Aotearoa New Zealand are made up of more than one of these types or variations of them. Connections animate the book. The physics of the seas, the biology of anemone and limpet, the long history of the earth itself, the governing myths and stories of those who have lived and survived here: all interconnect in the zone where philosopher, scientist and poet can meet and puzzle over the nature of what exists. And then comes the third chapter, 'Winkle,' where we enter the territory of fractals. Long of interest to me, Nicolson reports on fractals in ways that leaned toward philosophy and had me shaking my head in wonder and delight. Then he looks more widely at tides, at waves, at geology. He looks at the philosophical ideas of Heraclitus. He discusses the bitter and harsh social history of Argyllshire. All of this is interesting, and interestingly accounted for. So-called “ red tides” also have nothing to do with actual tides. A red tide is another term for an algal bloom. Algae are microscopicsea creatures. When billions of red algae form, or “bloom,” in the ocean, the waves and tides appear red.

Explore the science concepts that underpin knowledge and understanding about life between the tides. But there is a great deal more on the human evaluation - the history of the people that lived along the bay and made their living - or tried to - from the sea. From the Mesolithic to the present. As sacrifice, survival and beliefs tried to help their endurance of devastating conditions - abject poverty, hunger, and determination to more than exist. It is where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the marvellous an inch beneath your nose. ‘The soul wants to be wet,’ Heraclitus said in Ephesus 2,500 years ago. That is the impulse this book follows. People can be very active in the low-tide zone. Simple nets can catch fish here, and fishers can collect animals like crabs, mussels, and clams. “The tide is out, our table is set,” is a traditional saying among the Tlingit nation ( tribe), who live along the Pacific Northwest coast in Alaska and Canada.

This passage created an image of time pooling around me. Who is to say it does not? When I stop and really attend to something, time seems to stop for a moment and expand out. Science or pseudoscience? Looks like science from where I'm sitting.

How do sandhoppers inherit an inbuilt compass from their parents? How do crabs understand the tides? How can the death of one winkle guarantee the lives of its companions? What does a prawn know? Surf grass is the only true plant within the Intertidal Zone. All the other “plants” are algae, commonly referred to as seaweed. Algae are neither plant nor animal. The zooplankton (kōurangi) are tiny organisms that are found at and near the surface of the water and are the most numerous of the animals living in the tidal zone. They include tiny adult animals such as shrimps and krill and the larvae and young of fish and shellfish. Smaller fish (ika) and jellyfish (petipeti) depend on this food source and also live in the shallow waters.The plants of the intertidal zone must also deal with wave action. Brown kelp and sea tulips have flexible, leathery bodies with tough attachments to avoid being damaged by breaking waves, while pipi, tuatua and toheroa avoid wave action by burrowing into the sand or mud. Tidal energy is a renewable resource that many engineers and consumers hope will be developed on a large scale. Now, small programs in Northern Ireland, South Korea, and the U.S. state of Maine are experimenting with harnessing the power of tides. It is a hymn to the shore, afloat on ‘sea-sorrow’; the king’s body has become something like the floor of the sea. The colours of the shallow-deep waft over him. He is faded-rich. Encrusting jewels enshrine his head and his limbs transmute into submarine treasure. Everything that seems like threat and disaster is conjured here into masque-like glimmer. His corpse is a wonder of the wavering seas. And yet this is a song of death, an obsequy in which the elegance enshrines fatal loss, a drowning, a breaking of human connections, where the body is subject to the violence of the waves, and where sea nymphs ring the funeral bell. It is a place both of salt death and of scarcely imagined perfection. ‘What care these roarers for the name of King?’ the boatswain on their ship had cried as the winds had shrieked about them and now indeed the king has become treasure lying thirty feet down. Image: Pollution from the Fox Glacier landfill being washed down the Fox River and along the coast, DOC, CC BY 4.0. Every beach has a range of habitats, and different kinds of living things can be found in each habitat