The Edge of the Sea

by Rachel Carson

  On Long Island, where much glacial material has accumulated, the sands contain quantities of pink and red garnet and black tourmaline, along with many grains of magnetite. In New Jersey, where the coastal plain deposits of the south first appear, there is less magnetic material and less garnet. Smoky quartz predominates at Barnegat, glauconite at Monmouth Beach, and heavy minerals at Cape May. Here and there beryl occurs where molten magma has brought up deeply buried material of the ancient earth to crystallize near the surface.

  North of Virginia, less than half of one per cent of the sands are of calcium carbonate; southward, about 5 per cent. In North Carolina the abundance of calcareous or shell sand suddenly increases, although quartz sand still forms the bulk of the beach materials. Between Capes Hatteras and Lookout as much as 10 per cent of the beach sand is calcareous. And in North Carolina also there are odd local accumulations of special materials such as silicified wood—the same substance that is contained in the famous "singing sands" of the Island of Eigg in the Hebrides.

  The mineral sands of Florida are not of local origin but have been derived from the weathering of rocks in the Piedmont and Appalachian highlands of Georgia and South Carolina. The fragments are carried to the sea on southward-moving streams and rivers. Beaches of the northern part of Florida's Gulf Coast are almost pure quartz, composed of crystal grains that have descended from the mountains to sea level, accumulating there in plains of snowlike whiteness. About Venice there is a special sparkle and glitter over the sands, where crystals of the mineral zircon are dusted over its surface like diamonds; and here and there is a sprinkling of the blue, glasslike grains of cyanite. On the east coast of Florida, quartz sands predominate for much of the long coast line (it is the hard-packing quartz grains that compose the famous beaches of Daytona) but toward the south, the crystal sands are mingled more and more with fragments of shells. Near Miami the beach sands are less than half quartz; about Cape Sable and in the Keys the sand is almost entirely derived from coral and shell and the remains of foraminifera. And all along the east coast of Florida, the beaches receive small contributions of volcanic matter, as bits of floating pumice that have drifted for thousands of miles in ocean currents are stranded on the shore to become sand.

  Infinitely small though it is, something of its history may be revealed in the shape and texture of a grain of sand. Wind-transported sands tend to be better rounded than water-borne; furthermore, their surface shows a frosted effect from the abrasion of other grains carried in the blast of air. The same effect is seen on panes of glass near the sea, or on old bottles in the beach flotsam. Ancient sand grains, by their surface etchings, may give a clue to the climate of past ages. In European deposits of Pleistocene sand, the grains have frosted surfaces etched by the great winds blowing off the glaciers of the Ice Age.

  We think of rock as a symbol of durability, yet even the hardest rock shatters and wears away when attacked by rain, frost or surf. But a grain of sand is almost indestructible. It is the ultimate product of the work of the waves—the minute, hard core of mineral that remains after years of grinding and polishing. The tiny grains of wet sand lie with little space between them, each holding a film of water about itself by capillary attraction. Because of this cushioning liquid film, there is little further wearing by attrition. Even the blows of heavy surf cannot cause one sand grain to rub against another.

  In the intertidal zone, this minuscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and flora of the capillary water are single-celled animals and plants, water mites, shrimplike crustacea, insects, and the larvae of certain infinitely small worms—all living, dying, swimming, feeding, breathing, reproducing in a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the micro-droplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea.

  Not all sands are inhabited by this "interstitial fauna." Those derived from the weathering of crystalline rocks are most abundantly populated. Shell or coral sand seldom if ever contains copepods and other microscopic life; perhaps this indicates that the grains of calcium carbonate create unfavorably alkaline conditions in the water around them.

  On any beach the sum of all the little pools amid the sand grains represents the amount of water available to the animals of the sands during the low-tide interval. Sand of average fineness is able to contain almost its own volume of water, and so at low tide only the topmost layers dry out under a warm sun. Below it is damp and cool, for the contained water keeps the temperatures of the deeper sand practically constant. Even the salinity is fairly stable; only the most superficial layers are affected by rain falling on the beach or by streams of fresh water coursing across it.

  Bearing on its surface only the wave-carved ripple marks, the fine traceries of sand grains dropped at last by the spent waves, and the scattered shells of long-dead mollusks, the beach has a lifeless look, as though not only uninhabited but indeed uninhabitable. In the sands almost all is hidden. The only clues to the inhabitants of most beaches are found in winding tracks, in slight movements disturbing the upper layers, or in barely protruding tubes and all but concealed openings leading down to hidden burrows.

  The signs of living creatures are often visible, if not the animals themselves, in deep gullies that cut the beaches, parallel to the shore line, and hold at least a few inches of water from the fall of one tide until the return of the next. A little moving hill of sand may yield a moon snail intent on predatory errand. A V-shaped track may indicate the presence of a burrowing clam, a sea mouse, a heart urchin. A flat ribbonlike track may lead to a buried sand dollar or a starfish. And wherever protected flats of sand or sandy mud lie exposed between the tides, they are apt to be riddled with hundreds of holes, marked by the sign of the ghost shrimps within. Other flats may bristle with forests of protruding tubes, pencil thin and decorated weirdly with bits of shell or seaweed, an indication that legions of the plumed worm, Diopatra, live below. Or again there may be a wide area marked by the black conical mounds of the lugworm. Or here at the edge of the tide a chain of little parchment capsules, one end free and the other disappearing under the sand, shows that one of the large predatory whelks lies below, busy with the prolonged task of laying and protecting her eggs.

  But almost always the essence of the lives—the finding of food, the hiding from enemies, the capturing of prey, the producing of young, all that makes up the living and dying and perpetuating of this sand-beach fauna—is concealed from the eyes of those who merely glance at the surface of the sands and declare them barren.

  I remember a chill December morning on one of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, with the sands wet from a recently fallen tide and the fresh, clean wind blowing handfuls of spindrift along the beach. For several hundred yards, where the shore ran in a long curve from the Gulf toward the shelter of the bay, there were peculiar markings on the dark wet sand just above the water's edge. The marks were arranged in groups, in each of which a series of thin spidery lines radiated out from a central spot, as though unsteadily traced there by a slender stick. At first no sign of any living animal was to be seen—nothing to tell what creature had made these seemingly careless scribblings. After kneeling on the wet sand and looking at one after another of these strange insignia, I found that under each of the central spots lay the flat pentagonal disc of a serpent starfish. The marks on the sand were made by its long and slender arms, inscribing the record of its forward progress.

  And then I remember wading on a June day over Bird Shoal, which lies off the town of Beaufort in North Carolina, where at low tide acres of sand bottom are covered only by a few inches of water. Near the shore I found two sharply defined grooves in the sand; my index finger could have measured their span. Between the grooves was a faint, irregular line. Step by step, I was led out across the flat by the tracks; finally, a
t the temporary end of the trail, I came upon a young horseshoe crab, heading seaward.

  For most of the fauna of the sand beaches, the key to survival is to burrow into the wet sand, and to possess means of feeding, breathing and reproducing while lying below reach of the surf. And so the story of the sand is in part the story of small lives lived deep within it, finding in its dark, damp coolness a retreat from fish that come hunting with the tide and from birds that forage at the water's edge when the tide has fallen. Once below the surface layers, the burrower has found not only stable conditions but also a refuge where few enemies threaten. Those few are likely to reach down from above—perhaps a bird thrusting a long bill into the hole of a fiddler crab—a sting ray flapping along the bottom, plowing up the sand for buried mollusks—an octopus sliding an exploring tentacle down into a hole. Only an occasional enemy comes through the sand. The moon snail is a predator that makes a successful living in this difficult way. It is a blind creature with no use for eyes because it is forever groping through dark sands, hunting mollusks that live as much as a foot below the surface. Its smoothly rounded shell eases its descent into the sand as it digs with the immense foot. On locating prey, it holds the animal with the foot and drills a round hole in the shell. The moon snails are voracious; young animals eat more than a third of their weight in clams each week. Some worms also are predatory burrowers; so are a few starfish. But for most predators, continuous burrowing consumes more energy than would be supplied by the prey thus found. Most of the burrowers in sand are passive feeders, digging only enough to establish a temporary or permanent home in which to lie while straining food from the water or sucking up detritus that accumulates on the sea bottom.

  The rising tide sets in action a system of living filters through which prodigious quantities of water are strained. Buried mollusks push up their siphons through the sand to draw the incoming water through their bodies. Worms lying in U-shaped parchment tubes begin to pump, drawing the water in through one end of the tube, expelling it through the other. The incoming stream brings food and oxygen; the outgoing has been depleted of much of the food and bears away the organic wastes of the worm. Small crabs spread the feathery nets of their antennae like cast-nets to bring in food.

  With the tide, predators come from offshore. A blue crab dashes out of the surf to seize a fat mole crab that is in the act of spreading its antennae to filter the backwash of a receding wave. Clouds of salt-water minnows move in with the tide, searching for the small amphipods of the upper beach. Launce, or sand eels, dart through the shallow water seeking copepods or fish fry; sometimes the launce are pursued by the shadowy forms of larger fish.

  As the tide falls much of this extraordinary activity slackens. There is less eating and being eaten. In the wet sands, however, some animals can continue to eat even after the tide has receded. Lugworms can continue their work of passing sand through their bodies for the sake of the scraps of nutriment they contain. Heart urchins and sand dollars, lying in saturated sand, continue to sort out bits of food. But over most of the sands there is a lull of repletion—of waiting for the turn of the tide.

  Although there are many places where, on quieter shores and protected shoals, such richness of life may be found, certain ones live most clearly in my memories. On one of the sea islands of Georgia is a great beach that is visited only by the most gentle surf, although it looks straight across to Africa. Storms usually pass it by, for it lies well inside the long, incurving arc of coast that swings between the Capes of Fear and Canaveral, and the prevailing winds are such that no heavy swells roll in upon it. The texture of the beach itself is unusually firm because of a mixture of mud and clay with the sand; permanent holes and burrows can be dug in it, and the streaming tidal currents carve little ripple marks that remain after the tide goes out, looking like a miniature model of the sea's waves. These sand ripples hold small food particles dropped by the currents, providing a store to be drawn on by detritus feeders. The slope of the beach is so gentle that, when the tide falls to its lowest ebb, a quarter of a mile of sand is exposed between the high-tide line and the low. But this broad sand flat is not a perfectly even plain, for winding gullies wander across it, like creeks across the land, holding a remnant of water from the last high tide and providing a living place for animals that cannot endure even a temporary withdrawal of the water.

  It was in this place that I once found a large "bed" of sea pansies at the very edge of the tide. The day was heavily overcast, a fact that accounted for their being exposed. On sunny days I never saw them there, although undoubtedly they were just under the sand, protecting themselves from the drying rays of the sun.

  But the day I saw them the pink and lavender flower faces were lifted so that they were exposed at the surface of the sand, though so slightly that one could easily pass them by unnoticed. Seeing them—even recognizing them for what they were—there was a sense of incongruity in finding what looked so definitely flowerlike here at the edge of the sea.

  These flattened, heart-shaped sea pansies, raised on short stems above the sand, are not plants but animals. They belong to the same general group of simple beings as the jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals, but to find their nearest relatives one would have to desert the shore and go down to some deeplying offshore bottom where, as fernlike growths in a strange animal forest, the sea pens thrust long stalks into the soft ooze.

  Each sea pansy growing here at the edge of the tide is the product of a minute larva that once dropped from the currents to this shore. But through the extraordinary course of its development it has ceased to be that single being of its origin and has become instead a group or colony of many individuals, bound together into a whole of flowerlike form. The various individuals or polyps all have the shape of little tubes embedded in the fleshy substance of the colony. But some of the tubes bear tentacles and look like very small sea anemones; these capture food for the colony, and in the proper season form reproductive cells. Other tubes lack tentacles; these are the engineers of the colony, attending to the functions of water-intake and control. A hydraulic system of changing water pressure controls the movements of the colony; as the stem is made turgid it may be thrust down into the sand, drawing the main body after it.

  As the rising tide streams over the flattened shapes of the sea pansies, all the tentacles of the feeding polyps are thrust up, reaching for the living motes that dance in the water—the copepods, the diatoms, the fish larvae small and tenuous as threads.

  And at night the shallow water, rippling gently over these flats, must glow softly with hundreds of little lights marking out the zone where the sea pansies live, in a serpentine line of gleaming points, just as lights seen from an airplane at night wander across the dark landscape and show the path of settlement along a highway. For the sea pansies, like their deep-sea relatives, are beautifully luminescent.

  In season, the tide sweeping over these flats carries many small, pear-shaped, swimming larvae from which new colonies of pansies will develop. In past ages, the currents that traversed the open water then separating North and South America carried such larvae, which established themselves on the Pacific coast, north to Mexico and south to Chile. Then a bridge of land rose between the American continents, closing the water highway. Today the presence of sea pansies on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts is one of the living reminders of that past geologic time when North and South America were separated, and sea creatures passed freely from one ocean to the other.

  In that liquescent sand at the edge of the low tide, I often saw small bubblings and boilings under the surface as one or another of the sand dwellers slipped in or out of its hidden world.

  There were sand dollars, or keyhole urchins, thin as wafers. As one of them buried itself the forward edge slipped obliquely into the sand, passing with effortless ease from the world of sunlight and water into those dim regions of which my senses knew nothing. Internally, the shells are strengthened for burrowing, and against the force of surf, by suppo
rting pillars that occupy most of the region between upper and lower shells except in the center of the disc. The surface of the animal is covered with minute spines, soft as felt. The spines shimmered in the sunlight as their waving movements set up currents that kept the sand grains in motion and eased the passage of the creature from water into earth. On the back of the disc was dimly marked out a design like a five-petaled flower. Repeating the meaning and the symbolism of the number five—the sign of the echinoderms—were five holes perforating the flat disc. As the animal progressed just under the shifting film of surface sand, grains moved up from the under side through the holes, aiding its forward movement and spreading a concealing veil of sand over its body.

  The sand dollars shared their dark world with other echinoderms. Down in the wet sand lived heart urchins, which one never sees at the surface until the thin little boxes that once contained them are found by the tide and carried in to the beach, to be blown about by the wind and left at last in the litter of the high-tide line. The oddly shaped heart urchins lay in chambers six inches or more below the surface of the sand, keeping open for themselves channels lined with sticky mucus; through these they reached up to the floor of the shallow sea, finding diatoms and other particles of food among the sand grains.