Life Between the Tides

 
 
Life Between the Tides

by Adam Nicolson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2022

 

 

Life Between the Tides is nonfiction. Primarily it's about the kinds of plants and animals that live in tidal pools, their ecology and how their foodchain works. But it's both more specific and farther reaching. Nicholson constructed his own tide pools on an isolated bit of Scottish coast that previously had none. He writes about the species that come to fill his pools. But he also talks about the history of this part of Scotland, and a variety of scientific and philosophical concepts that emerge from his observations.
Nicolson builds three tide pools - hollow spaces that fill with water when they're covered by the high tide, and retain it during the low. Each seems a better habitat than the one before. 

 
In the first section he talks about prawns, animal consciousness and intelligence, periwinkles (a kind of mollusk,) the fractal nature of shorelines, which seem longer and longer the more precisely you measure them, green crabs, the discovery of crustacean metamorphosis and the related discovery that most (or all?) zooplankton are crustacean larvae, the role of apex predators like green crabs in maintaining complex biodiverse ecosystems, sea anemones that reproduce by cloning, and the vastly different sensory worlds of pre-Cambrian and later forms of life.

 
In the second section, Nicolson describes the folk beliefs that surround the tides and gives a perspective-altering way to think of them - that it is not really the tide that 'comes in' or 'goes out,' but the rotation of the Earth that drags the shoreline through the ocean, as our sphere of stone rotates through a relatively motionless ovoid of water. He also describes the layers of stone at that point in the Scottish coast, and which geologic events produced them, including how the slow wobble of the Earth's axis produces cyclical ice ages.
 

Finally, Nicoloson talks about the Scottish people. How the barren land was settled by fisher-gatherers, who were replaced by Eurasian agricultural peoples. How the clan societies worked, and made war on each other in response to poverty and hunger. How the English mapped them and conquered them. He talks about the folk belief in faeries, who are blamed for troubles and maladies, about Malthus and Spencer, about the philosophical distinction between the physical world our senses can perceive and the invisible, unknowable minds of others.

 
I expected a more straightforward biology book, but I appreciate Nicolson's more intellectually omnivorous approach to his subject, and I like the handful of watercolors, and dozens of photographs, that illustrate the text.