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

Product Information

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. 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

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. Did you ever read a book that was quite good for about 75%, but in the last 25% shot itself in the foot? That was this book for me.The article Building Science Concepts: Life between the tides provides additional science and pedagogical information. 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. Tides produce some interesting features in the ocean. Tides are also associated with features that have nothing to do with them.

Intertidal zones are marked by vertical zonation. Different organisms live in different zones in the tidal range, depending on how much water reaches them. This zonation can often be seen vertically, with dry plants near the top of the tidal zone and seaweeds near the bottom.

More Human Impact A lobster trap with a snail found in Zone 2 of the Cabrillo National Monument Tidepools in December 2010. Up out of the woods and on to the top of the hills. The whole riven province of Morvern, a mountainous fin of Scotland 80,000 acres wide and almost entirely surrounded by sea lochs, was laid out below us. We skirted the shoulders of the mountains and dropped to the pastures of a salmon river, past the freshwater loch at its head where the water slid out over the sandy beach, braided like silk, looking like whisky, and then along a heron-haunted shore to the sea. Crabs (pāpaka) and starfish (pātangatanga) move underwater over the hard and soft surfaces of the shore. Other animals such as pāua, limpets, sea anemones and mussels cling to the hard surfaces. Various other shellfish live buried in the sand and mud of soft shores.