The Edge of the Sea

by Rachel Carson

  Beyond the rims of the lowest pools, growing on the rock walls that slope away steeply into deep water, is another laminarian seaweed, Alaria, the winged kelp, called the murlin in Great Britain. Its long, ruffled, streaming fronds rise with each surge and fall as the water pours away seaward. The fertile pinnae, in which the reproductive cells mature, are borne at the base of the frond, for in a plant so exposed to violent surf this location is safer than the tips of the main blade. (In the rockweeds, living higher on the shore and less subject to savage wave action, the reproductive cells are formed at the tips of the fronds.) Almost more than any of the other seaweeds, Alaria is a plant conditioned to constant pounding by the waves. Standing on the outermost point that gives safe footing, one can see its dark ribbons streaming out into the water, being tugged and tossed and pounded. The larger and older plants become much frayed and worn, the margins of the blade splitting or the tip of the midrib being worn off. By such concessions the plant saves some of the strain on its holdfasts. The stipe can withstand a relatively enormous pull, but severe storms tear away many plants.

  Still farther down, one can sometimes and in some places get a glimpse of the dark, mysterious forests of the kelps, where they go down into deep water. Sometimes these giant kelps are cast ashore after a storm. They have a stiff, strong stipe from which the long ribbon of the frond extends. The sea tangle or sugar kelp, Laminaria saccharina, has a stipe up to 4 feet long, supporting a relatively narrow frond (6 to 18 inches wide) that may extend out and upward into the sea as much as 30 feet. The margin is greatly frilled and a powdery white substance (mannitol, a sugar) forms on the dried fronds. The long-stalked laminaria (Laminaria longicruris) has a stem comparable to the trunk of a small tree, being 6 to 12 feet long. The frond is up to 3 feet wide and 20 feet long, but may sometimes be shorter than the stipe.

  The stands of sea tangles and long-stalked laminarias are, in their way, an Atlantic counterpart of the great submarine jungles of the Pacific, where the kelps rise like giant forest trees, 150 feet from the floor of the sea to the surface.

  On all rocky coasts, this laminarian zone just below low water has been one of the least-known regions of the sea. We know little about what lives here throughout the year. We do not know whether some of the forms that disappear from the intertidal area in winter may merely move down into this zone. And perhaps some of the species we think have died out in a particular region, perhaps because of temperature changes, have gone down among the Laminarias. The area is obviously difficult to explore, with heavy seas breaking there most of the time. Such an area on the west coast of Scotland was, however, explored by helmet divers working with the British biologist, J. A. Kitching. Below the zone occupied by Alaria and the horsetail kelp, from about two fathoms below low water and beyond, the divers moved through a dense forest of the larger Laminarias. From the vertical stipes an immense canopy of fronds was spread above their heads. Although the sun shone brightly at the surface, the divers were almost in darkness as they pushed through this forest. Between three and six fathoms below low water of the spring tides the forest opened out, so that the men could walk between the plants without great difficulty. There the light was stronger, and through misty water they could see this more open "park" extending farther down the sloping floor of the sea. Among the holdfasts and stipes of the laminarias, as among the roots and trunks of a terrestrial forest, was a dense undergrowth, here formed of various red algae. And as small rodents and other creatures have their dens and runways under the forest trees, so a varied and abundant fauna lived on and among the holdfasts of the great seaweeds.

  In quieter waters, protected from the heavy surf of coasts that face the open ocean, the seaweeds dominate the shore, occupying every inch of space that the conditions of tidal rise and fall allow them and by the sheer force of abundant and luxuriant growth forcing other shore inhabitants to accommodate to their pattern.

  Although the same bands of life are spread between the tide lines whether the coast be open or sheltered, in their relative development the zones vary greatly on the two types of shore.

  Above the high-tide line there is little change and on the shores of bays and estuaries, as elsewhere, the microplants blacken the rocks and the lichens come down and tentatively approach the sea. Below high water of spring tides, pioneering barnacles trace occasional white streaks in token occupation of the zone they dominate on open coasts. A few periwinkles graze on the upper rocks. But on sheltered coasts the whole band of shore marked out by the tides of the moon's quarters is occupied by a swaying submarine forest, sensitive to the movements of the waves and the tidal currents. The trees of the forest are the large sea weeds known as the rockweeds or sea wracks, stout of form and rubbery of texture. Here all other life exists within their shelter—a shelter so hospitable to small things needing protection from drying air, from rain, and from the surge of the running tides and the waves, that the life of these shores is incredibly abundant.

  When covered at high tide, the rockweeds stand erect, rising and swaying with a life borrowed from the sea. Then, to one standing at the edge of a flooding tide, the only sign of their presence may be a scattering of dark patches on the water close inshore, where the tips of the weeds reach up to the surface. Down below those floating tips small fishes swim, passing between the weeds as birds fly through a forest, sea snails creep along the fronds, and crabs climb from branch to branch of the swaying plants. It is a fantastic jungle, mad in a Lewis Carroll sort of way. For what proper jungle, twice every twenty-four hours, begins to sag lower and lower and finally lies prostrate for several hours, only to rise again? Yet this is precisely what the rockweed jungles do. When the tide has retreated from the sloping rocks, when it has left the miniature seas of the tide pools, the rockweeds lie flat on the horizontal surfaces in layer above layer of sodden, rubbery fronds. From the sheer rock faces they hang down in a heavy curtain, holding the wetness of the sea, and nothing under their protective cover ever dries out.

  By day the sunlight filters through the jungle of rockweeds to reach its floor only in shifting patches of shadow-flecked gold; by night the moonlight spreads a silver ceiling above the forest—a ceiling streaked and broken by the flowing tide streams; beneath it the dark fronds of the weeds sway in a world unquiet with moving shadows.

  But the flow of time through this submarine forest is marked less by the alternation of light and darkness than by the rhythm of the tides. The lives of its creatures are ruled by the presence or absence of water; it is not the fall of dusk or the coming of dawn but the turn of the tide that brings transforming change to their world.

  As the tide falls the tips of the weeds, lacking support, float out horizontally across the surface. Then the cloud shadows darken and a deepening gloom settles over the floor of the forest. As the overlying layer of water thins and gradually drains away, the weeds, still stirring, still responsive to each pulsation of the tide, drift closer to the rock floor and finally lie prostrate upon it, all their life and movement in abeyance.

  By day an interval of quiet settles over the jungles of the land, when the hunters lie in their dens, and the weak and the slow hide from the daylight; so on the shore a waiting lull comes with every ebbing of the tide.

  The barnacles furl their nets and swing shut the twin doors that exclude the drying air and hold within the moisture of the sea. The mussels and the clams withdraw their feeding tubes or siphons and close their shells. Here and there a starfish, having invaded the forest from below on the previous high tide and incautiously lingered, still clasps a mussel within its sinuous arms, gripping the shells with the sucker-tipped ends of scores of slender tube feet. Pushing under and among the horizontal fronds of the weed, as a man would make his way with difficulty through trees blown down by a storm, a few crabs are active, digging their little slanting pits to expose the clams buried in the mud. Then they crack away pieces of shell with their heavy claws, while they hold the clam in the tips of the walking legs.

 
; A few hunters and scavengers come down from the upper tidelands. The little gray-cloaked tide-pool insect, Anurida, wanders down from the upper shore and scurries over the rock floor, hunting out mussels with gaping shells, or dead fish, or fragments of crabs left by gulls. Crows walk about over the weeds; they sort them over strand by strand until they find a periwinkle hidden in the weed, or clinging to a rock that lies under the sodden cloak of the algae. Then the crow holds the shell in the strong toes of one foot, while with its beak it deftly extracts the snail.

  The pulse of the returning tide at first beats gently. The advance during the beginning of the six-hour rise to high-water mark is slow, so that in two hours only a quarter of the intertidal zone has been covered. Then the pace of the water quickens. For the next two hours the tidal currents are stronger and the rising waters advance twice as far as in the first period; then again the tide slackens its pace for a leisurely advance over the upper shore. The rockweeds, covering the middle band of shore, receive the shock of heavier waves than the relatively bare shore above, yet their cushioning effect is so great that the animals that cling to them or live on the rock floor below them are far less affected by the surf than those of the upper rocks, or those of the zone below which experience all the heavy drag from the backwash of waves that break as the tide is advancing rapidly over the middle shore.

  Darkness brings the jungles of the land to life, but the night of the rockweed jungles is the time of the rising tide, when water pours in under the masses of weed, stirring out of their low-tide quiescence all the inhabitants of this forest.

  As the water from the open sea floods the floor of the weed jungles, shadows flicker again above the ivory cones of the barnacles as the almost invisible nets reach out to gather what the tide has brought. The shells of clams and mussels again open slightly and little vortices of water are drawn down, funneling into the complex straining mechanisms within the shellfish all the little spheres of marine vegetables that are their food.

  Nereid worms emerge from the mud and swim off to other hunting grounds; if they are to reach them they must elude the fishes that have come in with the tide, for on the flood tide the rockweed forests become one with the sea and with its hungry predators.

  Shrimp flicker in and out through the open spaces of the forest; they seek small crustaceans, baby fish, or minute bristle worms, but in their turn are pursued by following fish. Starfish move up from the great meadows of sea moss lower on the shore, hunting the mussels that grow on the floor of the forest.

  The crows and the gulls are driven out of the tidelands. The little gray, velvet-cloaked insects move up the shore or, finding a secure crevice, wrap themselves in a glistening blanket of air to wait for the falling of the tide.

  The rockweeds that create this intertidal forest are descendants of some of the earth's most ancient plants. Along with the great kelps lower on the shore, they belong to the group of brown seaweeds, in which the chlorophyll is masked by other pigments. The Greek name for the brown algae—the Phaeophyceae— means "the dusky or shadowy plants." According to some theories, they arose in that early period when the earth was still enveloped in heavy clouds and illuminated only by feeble rays of sunlight. Even today the brown seaweeds are plants of dim and shadowed places—the deep submarine slopes where giant kelps form dusky jungles and the dark rock ledges from which the oarweeds send their long ribbons streaming into the tides. And the rockweeds that grow between the tide lines do so on northern coasts, visited often by cloud and fog. Their rare invasions of the sunny tropics are accomplished under a protective cover of deep water.

  The brown algae may have been the first of the sea plants to colonize the shore. They learned to adjust themselves to alternating periods of submersion and exposure on ancient coastlines swept by strong tides; they came as close to a land existence as they could without actually leaving the tidal zone.

  One of the modern rockweeds, the channeled wrack of European shores, lives at the extreme upper edge of the tidelands. In some places its only contact with the sea is an occasional drenching with spray. In sun and air its fronds become blackened and crisp so that one would think it had surely been killed, but with the return of the sea its normal color and texture are restored.

  The channeled wrack does not grow on the American Atlantic coast, but there a related plant, the spiral wrack, comes almost as far out of the sea. It is a weed of low growth, whose short sturdy fronds end in turgid, rough-textured swellings. Its heaviest growth is above the high-water mark of the neap tides, so of all the rockweeds it lives closest inshore or nearest the water line of exposed ledges. Although it spends nearly three-fourths of its life out of water, it is a true seaweed and its splashes of orange-brown color on the upper shore are a symbol of the threshold of the sea.

  These plants, however, are but the outlying fringe of the intertidal forest, which is an almost pure stand of two other rockweeds—the knotted wrack and the bladder wrack. Both are sensitive indicators of the force of the surf. The knotted wrack can live in profusion only on shores protected from heavy waves, and in such places is the dominant weed. Back from the headlands, on the shores of bays and tidal rivers where surf and tidal surge are subdued by remoteness from the open sea, the knotted wrack may grow taller than the tallest man, though its fronds are slender as straws. The long surge of the swell in sheltered water places no great strain on its elastic strands. Swellings or vesicles on the main stems or fronds contain oxygen and other gases secreted by the plant; these act as buoys when the weeds are covered by the tide. The bladder wrack has greater tensile strength and so can endure the sharp tugging and pulling of moderately heavy surf. Although it is much shorter than the knotted wrack it also needs the help of air bladders to rise in the water. In this species the bladders are paired, one of each pair on either side of the strong midrib; the bladders, however, may fail to develop where the plants are subjected to much pounding by surf, or when they grow at the lower levels of the tidal zone. At some seasons the ends of the branches of this wrack swell into bulbous, almost heart-shaped structures; from these the reproductive cells are liberated.

  The sea wracks have no roots, but instead grip the rocks by means of a flattened, disc-like expansion of their tissues. It is almost as though the base of each weed melted a little, spreading over the rock and then congealing, thereby creating a union so firm that only the thundering seas of a very heavy storm, or the grinding of shore ice, can tear away the plants. The seaweeds do not have a land plant's need of roots to extract minerals from the soil, for they are bathed almost continuously by the sea and so live within a solution of all the minerals they need for life. Nor do they need the rigid supporting stem or trunk by which a land plant reaches upward into sunlight—they have only to yield themselves to the water. And so their structure is simple—merely a branching frond arising from the holdfast, with no division into roots and stems and leaves.

  Looking at the prostrate, low-tide forests of the rockweeds that cover the shore with a many-layered blanket, one would suppose that the plants must spring from every available inch of rock surface. But actually the forest, when it rises and comes to life with the flooding tide, is fairly open and sprinkled with clearings. On my own shore in Maine, where the tides rise and fall over a wide expanse of intertidal rock, and the knotted wrack spreads its dark blanket between the high and low waters of the neap tides, the areas of open rock around the holdfast of each plant are sometimes as much as a foot in diameter. From the middle of such a clearing the plant rises, its fronds dividing repeatedly, until the upper branchings extend out over an area several feet across.

  Far below, at the base of the fronds that swing with the undulation of the passing waves, the rocks are stained with vivid hues, painted in crimson and emerald by the activities of sea plants so minute that even in their thousands they seem but part of the rock, a surface revelation of jewel tones within. The green patches are growths of one of the green algae. The individual plants are so small that only a st
rong lens could reveal their identity—lost, as individual blades of grass are lost in the lush expanse of a meadow, in the spreading verdant stain created by the mass. Amid the green are other patches of a rich and intensely glowing red, and again the growth is not separable from the mineral floor. It is a creation of one of the red seaweeds, a form that secretes lime in thin and closely adhering crusts over the rocks.

  Against this background of glowing color the barnacles stand out with sharp distinctness, and in the clear water that pours through the forest like liquid glass, their cirri flicker in and out-extending, grasping, withdrawing, taking from the inpouring tides those minute atoms of life that our eyes cannot see. Around the bases of small wave-rounded boulders the mussels lie as though at anchor, held by gleaming lines spun by their own tissues. Their paired blue shells stand a little apart, the space between them revealing pale brown tissues with fluted edges.

  Some parts of the forest are less open. In these the clumps of rockweeds rise from a short turf or undergrowth consisting chiefly of the flat fronds of Irish moss, with sometimes dark mats of another plant with the texture of Turkish toweling. And like a tropical jungle with its orchids, this sea forest has the counterpart of airplants in the epiphytic tufts of a red seaweed that grows on the fronds of the knotted wrack. Polysiphonia seems to have lost—or perhaps it never had—the ability to attach directly to the rocks and so its dark red balls of finely divided fronds cling to the wracks, and by them are lifted up into the water.