Sea as soup

I was faced with a mountain of washing up and had run out of podcasts and had nothing on the go from Borrowbox. Rather than being the Trappist plongeur or, worse, listening to RTE on the wireless, I logged on and downloaded something, anything, from the non-fiction bin. Came up with The sea is not made of water : life between the tides by Adam Nicolson [prev], which starts with a (for me) wonderful mix of Linnaean binomers and purple (and green & brown & red) prose describing his adventures on the foreshore. In one project he secures permission to create a new rockpool in Argyll. Three days are spend with maul and bar to create a depression which has not been wet since the Jurassic. Rain and the tide duly brim-fills this shallow dip in the landscape and Nicolson settles down to record the immigrants . . . and muse on the etymology of "brim". My experience of tidal pools is entirely superficial: it's wet; there's "a fish"; anemones; a pebble . . . Nicolson has more patience and observational skills and can count.

But nobody can do really useful field-work in the week remaining of their summer holidays and Nicolson turns to the scientific literature to report on the dynamic processes that affect species abundance: mostly nature red in tooth and claw. a cost-benefit trade off played out over evolutionary time. One rock scissor stone tale looked at the interactions of common periwinkles Littorina littorea, green shore crab Carcinus maenus and green algae like Cladophora spp and Ulva lactuca. The winkles eat the algae, which shelter the crabs, which eat the winkles. Who wins depends on how far up the shore the pool is and the local rapacity of gulls which can swallow crabs whole.

It's true that sounds like a very simple ecosystem but you have to start with simple models - preferably generating testable hypotheses - if you're going to establish some principals in our understanding of how life ticks. Later he cites Bob Paine's (1933-2016 obit) concept of key-stone species - often top predators - whose impact cascades down the food-chain. Paine found that when he fecked out all the ochre starfish Pisaster ochraceus on a section of the foreshore, its favorite food mussels Mytilus californianus spread unchecked across the rocks depriving lots of other shellfish of a home. Within a short time the number of invertebrate species halved compared to a control (starfish present) plot. Same with wolves in Yellowstone: in their absence, deer eat all the twiggy saplings leading to deforestation and a catastrophic decline in all the species which use trees for shelter, food or infection (hey fungi have rights, too).

This is, for sure, a beautifully written hello beach, hello sky book. But it is also a philosophical and historical treatise explaining how smarter people than you-and-me made sense of the natural world. He carries a torch of Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 – 475 BCE) in a similar way that botanist Anna Pavord tribs Theophrastus of Lesbos. There's a succinct history on the causes of tides, including enough of the wrong turns associated with famously smart blokes (Kepler - looking at you) to make me realise that tides simple neither conceptually nor locally. This is followed by a weird chapter on Andromeda stories - where vulnerable people (women, esp virgins, suicides, the unhinged) are pegged out at low tide, so that the sea can perform a non-culpable "disposal". Check out Catherine Campbell MacLean for as local example?

Whoa, Adam: that's a kinda niche to be sharing with beachcombers. But the Nicolson rabbit holes are many and varied - a bit like The Blob. Not many readers will be familiar with the works of 19thC marine biologist Philip Gosse, whose biblical literalism conceived and delivered Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot in 1857. Far from untying anything, Gosse made his arguments into a tangle of special pleading to explain why Adam had a navel (omphalos) and why God created loadsa a dead fossils to bamboozle contemporary geologists. As we all know, Darwin brought out a much more satisfying, internal consistent hypothesis two years later with On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. I knew about Gosse b/c very expensive education but also because of his son Edmund's compelling growing up oppressed story Father and Son ". . . one of our best accounts of adolescence, particularly for those who endured . . . a religious upbringing".

Bottom line for the soul: Nicolson's fossicking along the tide-line seems to lead up to his sympathetic ruminations on Martin Heidigger - emphatically not because Heidigger was an enthusiastic Nazi. It was more because of Heidigger's quip "I care therefore I am" and his concept of Dasein - being present when out and about in the world. Nicolson has spent his entire life in reconciliation between his scientific and poetic understanding of existence - both his and each periwinkle's and the interaction terms! I'm on board with this, having made Science as A Way of Knowing a running theme in The Blob. But I also really like that Nicolson accepts that humans are not cartoons. 21stC discourse finds it all too easy to bring down the shutters: oh, that bastard is, like, A Nazi I don't need to engage with, listen to, or acknowledge the existence of such perps. That's easy; much more difficult to look into the dark corners of our own souls and work on that. And dismissing everything that makes me uncomfortable is all too easy to generalise to include the undeserving: the disabled, the poor, communiss, People of The Book, the homeless, that misogynistic colleague, boat-people . . . travellers.

Bottom line for the shore: the sea is big, wet and salty and a very great number of creatures live there. To the nearest whole number we know 0% about how these denizens interact and are inter-dependent. Humans are almost certainly a key-stone species for world between the tides. Blundering about on the beach with our yappy dogs; allowing a company like Exxon to operate 200,000 tonne oil tankers; forcing the sea to suck up all our CO₂.