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

Product Information

Herbivorous and carnivorous animals are part of a group of animals known as consumers. Their food webs begin with the plants of the ocean; microscopic algae such as phytoplankton. Zooplankton graze on this ‘pasture of the sea’. These two forms of plankton form the basic food for all beach community animals.

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. Image: Ngarimu Bay, Anne Barker. There are various kinds of beaches, and the way they look is constantly changing The concepts listed just above the overarching concepts reflect learning at New Zealand Curriculum level 1 and show how they may build in s equence to levels 2–3. The overarching science concepts are fully developed concepts and might not be achieved until level 7 or 8. 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. The moon’s ability to raise tides on the Earth is an example of a tidal force. The moon exerts a tidal force on the whole planet. This has little effect on Earth’s land surfaces, because they are less flexible. Land surfaces do move, however, up to 55 centimeters (22 inches) a day. These movements are called terrestrial tides. Terrestrial tides can change an object’s precise location. Terrestrial tides are important for radio astronomy and calculating coordinates on a global positioning system (GPS). Volcanologists study terrestrial tides because this movement in the Earth’s crust can sometimes trigger a volcanic eruption.

Adam Nicolson takes the margins between land and water, poetry and biology, and creates a beautiful, powerful story of how we understand the unfolding change of the shore. This is a remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things, both a call-to-arms and a call-to-pause and truly look. Nicolson is unique as a writer, happy soaked to the skin on the shoreline and happy unweaving skeins of philosophy. I loved it." — Edmund de Waal, author of Letters to Camondo

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. The zooplankton (kōurangi) are tiny organisms that are found at and near the surface of the water and are the most numerous of the animals living in the tidal zone. They include tiny adult animals such as shrimps and krill and the larvae and young of fish and shellfish. Smaller fish (ika) and jellyfish (petipeti) depend on this food source and also live in the shallow waters.New Zealand beaches include a variety of distinct habitats, each supporting a wide range of living things. All beaches share several characteristics: 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.

While a tidal bore is a tidal wave, a tsunami is not. Tsunami is taken from the Japanese words for “harbor wave.” Tsunamis are caused not by tides, but by underwater earthquakes and volcanoes. Tsunamis are associated with tides because their reach surpasses the tidal range of an area. 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. 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. 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. I found this book phenomenal, so much more than I had hoped. It's so accessible, fairly easy to understand, yet presents new information along with some I have been exposed to before, but in new, entertaining ways.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 low-tide zone (4) is only dry at the lowest tide. Nudibranchs, a type of sea slug, live in tide pools in the low-tide zone. Like the sea star, this animal is a carnivore. Nudibranchs eat sponges, barnacles and other nudibranchs. Nudibranchs can also eat sea anemones, because they are immune to its poisonous tentacles.

In most tidal energy generators, turbines are put in tidal streams (1). A turbine is a machine that takes energy from a flow of fluid. That fluid can be air ( wind) or liquid (water). Because water is more dense than air, tidal energy is more powerful than wind energy. Placing turbines in tidal streams can be difficult, because the machine disrupts the tide it is trying to harness. However, once the turbines are in place, tidal energy is predictable and stable. The moon’s tidal force has a much greater effect on the surface of the ocean, of course. Water is liquid and can respond to gravity more dramatically. Plants and animals at the beach, like living things everywhere, need shelter to survive. A range of environmental factors make life at the beach challenging: wave action, tide, drying effects of the Sun, wind, particles of salt, periodic covering and uncovering by water and changing salinity levels, not to mention predators.

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. 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: Animals that breathe with lungs but depend on the sea for their food such as penguins, seals and seabirds (manutai) live on or near the shore. 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)