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

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Presence of water – saltwater or a combination of saltwater and freshwater in mudflats and estuaries. A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field, science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. 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. 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. Tides produce some interesting features in the ocean. Tides are also associated with features that have nothing to do with them.

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.There is something about a pool which – not to make too gross a pun on it – encourages the reflective, leads the mind not merely to transcribe the experience of the actual, to give it a topography, but allows the questions of why it means what it does, what its reality consists of, to what extent everything that confronts you is more than the local. 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 article Building Science Concepts: Life between the tides provides additional science and pedagogical information. Through the process of photosynthesis, plants in the water, as on land, produce their own food in the form of starches and sugars, so they are called producers. They can access carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and oxygen for respiration from the water.

There are three different types of tidal power. All of these use tidal energy generators to convert that power into electricity for use in homes and industry. 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.Students often overlook the role of small species in a beach community – for example, the plants and tiny insects living there – and focus instead on larger animals such as birds and fish. This topic provides an opportunity to draw their attention to the variety of species in a beach community and the importance and interdependence of all the members of that community. The Middle Intertidal Zone is fully submerged during high tide and fully exposed during low tide. Tidepool critters found here have adapted to these drastic twice-daily changes. Residents of this zone include California mussels, aggregating anemones, limpets, chitons, California sea hares, snails, crabs, fishes, lobsters, and octopuses.

I really enjoyed the in-depth descriptions and creative storytelling, and the prose itself was very thought-provoking and intriguing. However, my enjoyment of this book was upset with the discussion of overpopulation as a fact. The first section is the strongest & more how I imagined the book to be from it’s description. The second is interesting, but won’t be anything new to people who read a bit about the sea & tides. The final section started off in a style akin to Kathleen Jamie so I was ready for a strong finish, which never materialised. This book is not what I thought it would be. I wanted to learn facts about the biology and maybe geology of the intertidal zone. There was precious little of that. Rather these topics were primarily an excuse for the author to start philosophizing pretentiously but vacuously about abstract notions. The following is typical of many other passages: Intertidal Zones (Zonation): The natural division of the area between when the tide is at its highest and at its lowest. The concepts introduced here are developed further in Building Science Concepts: Tidal communities which explores the overarching concepts for levels 3 and 4.Their shelter is a combination of their physical surroundings and the protective mechanisms they have developed that suit these conditions. Their shelter must be located near their food, so each type of living thing tends to live in a defined habitat in a specific zone on the beach. Image: Ngarimu Bay, Anne Barker. There are various kinds of beaches, and the way they look is constantly changing

Below the low-tide line – the area beyond the lowest point that the tide goes out to in normal conditions that is always underwater. 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) 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.A lot more about life within the rhythm of sea and tides rather than what's happening amidst the tidal pools that the author created in the bay near his Scots summer residence. 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. In this context,' Fossat wrote in Science, 'the crayfish represents a new model that might provide insights into the mechanisms underlying anxiety that have been conserved during evolution. Our results also emphasize the ability of an invertebrate to exhibit a state that is similar to a mammalian emotion but which likely arose early during the evolution of metazoans.