Under a blue sky

 Just a rocky, sandy, seaweedy, barnacly, watery beach.

Stories Beach.

The water to the right is runoff from the land; rain and snow returning home. It's a centimetre deep, or maybe 2 in spots; usually not enough to reach into my shoes. Where it flows, the tidepools alternate twice daily from salt water to freshwater; a challenging environment for anemones and crabs and other beach residents.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Una playa con todo: arena, piedras, agua, bálanos, algas marinas verdes y rojas. Lo azul al lado derecho es agua que baja desde tierra firma; la lluvia y la nieve camino a casa. Apenas cubre uno o dos centímetros, no suficiente como para meterse dentro de mis zapatos. Donde fluye, los pozos intramareales cambian dos veces diarias entre agua salada y agua fresca. Es un ambiente con retos para las anémonas, los cangrejos, y los otros organismos que aquí viven.

Empty beach

Saratoga Beach, Christmas day; a rare moment when all the groups of walkers were behind me.

Fine, white sand (viewed under a light). And fine, new, white snow on the distant mountains.

Something very strange; I collected a good handful of sand from the very edge of the water, well below the upper intertidal limit. I took it home in a plastic bag, poured it into a tray and watched it under a lens, and then my hand microscope. Usually, within minutes I can see signs of activity; a grain of sand tumbling as a worm thrashes underneath it, a minute snail making his slow way among the "rocks", a string of copepods chasing each other through the ravines.

There was nothing happening here. Not the least hint of vibration. No corner-of-my-eye flashes, gone before I turned my attention that way. Viewed from an angle, no mini-bubbles.

I left the tray overnight, and then over the whole day, giving worms time to build their tubes to the surface. Nothing happened. I looked again, just now. There's nothing there but glassy sand grains and water. Not even remains of sea creatures, broken shells and bits of crab molt. Nothing but sand.

I have never seen anything similar, except in sun-baked sand found on top of logs. There should be something alive there!

Granted, my microscope only goes to 40x, so with a more powerful machine, I could probably find bacteria and diatoms. But it is still curious; there should be hundreds of worms in there, at least!

I must make a return trip, collect more sand, from different spots.

(I flipped a few stones on that spit in the distance. No crabs, no snails. I did find some barnacles.)

Homebodies

It may be a mistake to think of a given beach as "the beach", at least as far as its small residents are concerned. They don't live there, in the way we live in the Lower Fraser Valley, but are free to travel or move house to any part of the world, with little inconvenience. (Always excepting Antarctica or the sea bottom, of course.) The intertidal critters live in small communities, sometimes never leaving their underside of a rock, or the line where stones give way to mud, for example.

Barnacles and periwinkles, and probably a crab or two.

Mud snails are relatively mobile. We have watched them as the tide retreats, just above the water line, hurrying down in pursuit of the disappearing shelter of the waves. They're not fast enough, and after a futile chase of a few minutes, they bury themselves in the sand to wait for conditions to improve. I sometimes follow their trails from exit hole to new retreat; they manage to cover about 10 of my paces, but rarely in a straight line, so they're not too far from home when they stop.

Hermit crabs scuttle about, sometimes covering quite a distance, compared to their size. And I have seen them, caught in the current, rolling, rolling, out with the tide, until they find some strand of eelgrass to grab onto before they get nabbed by a passing fish.

The other day, walking on the bare sand, I picked up every snail shell I saw, and examined it. Every one, every single one, without exception, held a hermit crab. If a hermit borrows the shell from a snail that died and was eaten, then the hermits and snails should be found in the same general location, I reasoned. But I saw no snails where there were hermits.

Maybe the snails had dug themselves into the sand when the tide went out. So when I picked up a hermit in a snail shell, I dug in that area, scooping out the sand and water wrist deep. Each time, I found clams, clams, clams, clams. No snails. Not one.

So the hermits, at least, have travelled some distance from their supply of homes.

All this is well and good; a barnacle or a mussel on a rock is basically set for life; a starfish in a crevice at the mid-tidal zone will still be there next week or month, a snail circles around the bits of beach that feel comfortable.

Double holdfast

But what of the poor critters that settle down in a perfect spot, sheltered, climate-controlled, well supplied with food and company, only to find their home uprooted and tossed on some inhospitable shore, exposed to air and light and flies? What of the subtidal residents of bull kelp holdfasts, or the eelgrass root dwellers?

Ma Nature is so unfair!