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

Product Information

Twice each month, the moon lines up with the Earth and sun. These are called the new moon and the full moon. When the moon is between the Earth and the sun, it is in the sun’s shadow and appears dark. This is the new moon. When the Earth is between the sun and moon, the moon reflects sunlight. This is the full moon. In the shade of these weeds, the most unlikely drawing-room colours erupt on a damp Scottish coastline. The coralline makes a vermilion mat where the limpets dig their nests. Venetian-striped top shells crawl between the dried-blood red of the beadlet anemones. Bright yellow and green sponges line the polychrome pools. Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... During low tide visitors can witness residents interacting with each other and utilizing the algae and surf grass for food and shelter.

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. Nicolson] succeeds gloriously in conveying the marvels of a stretch of Scottish tidal coast, mixing history, science, and precise descriptions bright with inventive metaphors and profound revelations." — Booklist (Starred Review)Zone 2 – starts approximately at south end of Zone 1 bay and ends at the Coast Guard boundary; only uncovered during low tides A remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things … Nicolson is unique as a writer … I loved it’ EDMUND DE WAAL Few places are as familiar as the shore – and few as full of mystery and surprise. Tidepool Management Zones: CNM created tidepool boundary areas around the tip of the Point Loma Peninsula into:

The splash zone – the area just above the high-tide line that water doesn’t cover but can get splashed by waves, especially if they are big or at high tide. Life Between the Tides] evokes [the tide pools’] tiny inhabitants in lovely detail . . . Periwinkles smell the juices of their crab-killed comrades and flee into crevices. There’s brutality here, but also brilliance—anemones, despite literal brainlessness, adeptly size up their rivals—and astonishing tenderness . . . Nicolson’s at his best when he’s focused on his precious littoral world.” —Ben Goldfarb, The New York Times Book Review On the eve of becoming a married man, the Counselor makes a risky entrée into the drug trade—and gambles that the consequences won’t catch up to him.

Then we go sideways into a history of people from the area, which involves starvation and over-fishing, and the history of Scottish clan warfare and waaaaay too much information on how they are featured in the mythology and lore of the area. Living in the intertidal zone offers a range of challenges to the organisms that live there, and these environmental challenges are not constant but are shifting and changing all the time. The organisms that live in this rapidly changing ecosystem have a range of adaptations to enable them to survive. We stayed the night about ten miles away in a small guest house on the shores of Loch Sunart. A polite atmosphere: cloths on the tables, charming, smiling service at dinner by the man who owned the hotel, a retired biologist, who dipped the end of his tie in the parsnip soup as he set it down in front of us. No one in the dining room said a word. The butter came on silver scallops, the oatcakes were in their own airtight tin and we whispered our secrecies over the venison and the crumble. Reading this book felt akin to some sort of sacred act - it left me reeling with awe at the thinking therein. The sense of suddenly understanding things I knew I had, at some level, known to be true but not yet fully perceived. I eked it out, over several months, because I didn’t want it to end and felt the need to savour various moments and roll them around my mind with relish.

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.There seemed to be some indecision over whether to be a biology textbook (the section on creatures was pretty in depth and pseudo-scientific to the point of being tedious), an oceanography book, a philosophy text, a history book? Usually, nature journals with a mix of the personal and science fascinate me, but I think the bizarre, erratic nature of this book just baffled and disinterested me. 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. The concepts introduced here are developed further in Building Science Concepts: Tidal communities which explores the overarching concepts for levels 3 and 4. I understand that to many people a book about tide pools and the animals and plants that live in them may sound boring but that’s exactly what I wanted. And it’s NOT AT ALL what I found here. The first half of the book which is at least mostly about tide pools focuses on the authors DIY creations and how they filled up. Fine but why not have one chapter about that and the rest exploring mature tide pools in various marine environments around the world???

Change can come from the land as well as the sea. Flood events can send huge amounts of water down rivers, carrying debris such as trees, branches and silt downstream. If this material builds up in estuaries, the river’s course can change, leaving tidal mudflats high and dry. The debris left over from logging operations known as slash causes many problems for the inhabitants of river valleys and the seashore. Overpopulation for humans is a myth. Sure, in nature, there is a natural push and pull over resources. But the fact remains that humans have long had the resources and know-how to allow everyone to thrive, yet the rich hoard wealth, resources, and knowledge, which results in poverty.

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.