The Edge of the Sea

by Rachel Carson

  Although no one recorded the first colonist or traced the succession of living forms, we may make a fairly confident guess as to the pioneers of the occupation of these rocks, and the forms that followed them. The invading sea must have brought the larvae and young of many kinds of shore animals, but only those able to find food could survive on the new shore. And in the beginning the only available food was the plankton that came in renewed clouds with every tide that washed the coastal rocks. The first permanent inhabitants must have been such plankton-strainers as the barnacles and mussels, who require little but a firm place to which they may attach themselves. Around and among the white cones of the barnacles and the dark shells of the mussels it is probable that the spores of algae settled, so that a living green film began to spread over the upper rocks. Then the grazers could come—the little herds of snails that laboriously scrape the rocks with their sharp tongues, licking off the nearly invisible covering of tiny plant cells. Only after the establishment of the plankton-strainers and the grazers could the carnivores settle and survive. The predatory dog whelks, the starfish, and many of the crabs and worms must, then, have been comparative latecomers to this rocky shore. But all of them are there now, living out their lives in the horizontal zones created by the tides, or in the little pockets or communities of life established by the need to take shelter from surf, or to find food, or to hide from enemies.

  The pattern of life spread before me when I emerge from that forest path is one characteristic of exposed shores. From the edge of the spruce forests down to the dark groves of the kelps, the life of the land grades into the life of the sea, perhaps with less abruptness than one would expect, for by various little interlacing ties the ancient unity of the two is made clear.

  Lichens live in the forest above the sea, in the silent intensity of their toil crumbling away the rocks as lichens have done for millions of years. Some leave the forest and advance over the bare rock toward the tide line; a few go even farther, enduring a periodic submersion by the sea so that they may work their strange magic on the rocks of the intertidal zone. In the dampness of foggy mornings the rock tripe on the seaward slopes is like sheets of thin, pliable green leather, but by midday under a drying sun it has become blackened and brittle; then the rocks look as though they were sloughing off a thin outer layer. Thriving in the salt spray, the wall lichen spreads its orange stain on the cliffs and even on the landward side of boulders that are visited by the highest tides of each moon. Scales of other lichens, sage-green, rolled and twisted into strange shapes, rise from the lower rocks; from their under surfaces black, hairy processes work down among the minute particles of rock substance, giving off an acid secretion to dissolve the rock. As the hairs absorb moisture and swell, fine grains of the rock are dislodged and so the work of creating soil from the rock is advanced.

  Below the forest's edge the rock is white or gray or buff, according to its mineral nature. It is dry and belongs to the land; except for a few insects or other land creatures using it as pathways to the sea it is barren. But just above the area that clearly belongs to the sea, it shows a strange discoloration, being strongly marked with streaks or patches or continuous bands of black. Nothing about this black zone suggests life; one would call it a dark stain, or at most a felty roughening of the rock surface. Yet it is actually a dense growth of minute plants. The species that compose it sometimes include a very small lichen, sometimes one or more of the green algae, but most numerously the simplest and most ancient of all plants, the blue-green algae. Some are enclosed in slimy sheaths that protect them from drying and fit them to endure long exposure to sun and air. All are so minute as to be invisible as individual plants. Their gelatinous sheaths and the fact that the whole area receives the spray of breaking waves make this entrance to the sea world slippery as the smoothest ice.

  This black zone of the shore has a meaning above and beyond its drab and lifeless aspect—a meaning obscure, elusive, and infinitely tantalizing. Wherever rocks meet the sea, the microplants have written their dark inscription, a message only partially legible although it seems in some way to be concerned with the universality of tides and oceans. Though other elements of the intertidal world come and go, this darkening stain is omnipresent. The rockweeds, the barnacles, the snails, and the mussels appear and disappear in the intertidal zone according to the changing nature of their world, but the black inscriptions of the microplants are always there. Seeing them here on this Maine coast, I remember how they also blackened the coral rim of Key Largo, and streaked the smooth platform of coquina at St. Augustine, and left their tracings on the concrete jetties at Beaufort. It is the same all over the world—from South Africa to Norway and from the Aleutians to Australia. This is the sign of the meeting of land and sea.

  Once below the dark film, I begin to look for the first of the sea creatures pressing up to the threshold of the land. In seams and crevices in the high rocks I find them—the smallest of the periwinkle tribe, the rock or rough periwinkle. Some—the infant snails—are so small that I need my hand lens to see them clearly, and among the hundreds that crowd into these cracks and depressions I can find a gradation of sizes up to the half-inch adults. If these were sea creatures of ordinary habits, I would think the small snails were young produced by some distant colony and drifted here as larvae after spending a period at sea. But the rough periwinkle sends no young into the sea; instead it is a viviparous species and the eggs, each encased within a cocoon, are held within the mother while they develop. The contents of the cocoon nourish the young snail until finally it breaks through the egg capsule and then emerges from the mother's body, a completely shelled little creature about the size of a grain of finely ground coffee. So small an animal might easily be washed out to sea; hence, no doubt, the habit of hiding in crevices and in empty barnacle shells, where often I have found them in numbers.

  At the level where most of the rough periwinkles live, however, the sea comes only every fortnight on the spring tides, and in the long intervals the flying spray of breaking waves is their only contact with the water. While the rocks are thoroughly wet with spray the periwinkles can spend much time out on the rocks feeding, often working well up into the black zone. The microplants that create the slippery film on the rocks are their food; like all snails of their group, the periwinkles are vegetarians. They feed by scraping the rocks with a peculiar organ set with many rows of sharp, calcareous teeth. This organ, the radula, is a continuous belt or ribbon that lies on the floor of the pharynx. If unwound, it would be many times the length of the animal, but it is tightly coiled like a watch spring. The radula itself consists of chitin, the substance of insects' wings and lobsters' shells. The teeth that stud it are arranged in several hundred rows (in another species, the common periwinkle, the teeth total about 3500). A certain amount of wear is involved in scraping the rocks, and when the teeth in current use are worn down, an endless supply of new ones can be rolled up from behind.

  And there is wear, also, on the rocks. Over the decades and the centuries, a large population of periwinkles scraping the rocks for food has a pronounced erosive effect, cutting away rock surfaces, grain by grain, deepening the tide pools. In a tide pool observed for sixteen years by a California biologist, periwinkles lowered the floor about three-eighths of an inch. Rain, frost, and floods—the earth's major forces of erosion-operate on approximately such a scale.

  The periwinkles grazing on the intertidal rocks, waiting for the return of the tide, are poised also in time, waiting for the moment when they can complete their present phase of evolution and move forward onto the land. All snails that are now terrestrial came of marine ancestry, their forebears having at some time made the transitional crossing of the shore. The periwinkles now are in mid-passage. In the structure and habits of the three species found on the New England coast, one can see clearly the evolutionary stages by which a marine creature is transformed into a land dweller. The smooth periwinkle, still bound to the sea, can endure only brief expo
sure. At low tide it remains in wet seaweeds. The common periwinkle often lives where it is submerged only briefly at high tide. It still sheds eggs into the sea and so is not ready for land life. The rough periwinkle, however, has cut most of the ties that confine it to the sea; it is now almost a land animal. By becoming viviparous it has progressed beyond dependence on the sea for reproduction. It is able to thrive at the level of the high water of the spring tides because, unlike the related periwinkles of lower tidal levels, it possesses a gill cavity that is well supplied with blood vessels and functions almost as a lung to breathe oxygen from the air. Constant submersion is, in fact, fatal to it and at the present stage of its evolution it can endure up to thirty-one days of exposure to dry air.

  The rough periwinkle has been found by a French experimenter to have the rhythm of the tides deeply impressed upon its behavior patterns, so that it "remembers" even when no longer exposed to the alternating rise and fall of the water. It is most active during the fortnightly visits of the spring tides to its rocks, but in the waterless intervals it becomes progressively more sluggish and its tissues undergo a certain desiccation. With the return of the spring tides the cycle is reversed. When taken into a laboratory the snails for many months reflect in their behavior the advance and retreat of the sea over their native shores.

  On this exposed New England coast the most conspicuous animals of the high-tide zone are the rock or acorn barnacles, which are able to live in all but the most tumultuous surf. The rockweeds here are so stunted by wave action that they offer no competition, and so the barnacles have taken over the upper shore, except for such space as the mussels have been able to hold.

  At low tide the barnacle-covered rocks seem a mineral landscape carved and sculptured into millions of little sharply pointed cones. There is no movement, no sign or suggestion of life. The stony shells, like those of mollusks, are calcareous and are secreted by the invisible animals within. Each cone-shaped shell consists of six neatly fitted plates forming an encircling ring. A covering door of four plates closes to protect the barnacle from drying when the tide has ebbed, or swings open to allow it to feed. The first ripples of incoming tide bring the petrified fields to life. Then, if one stands ankle-deep in water and observes closely, one sees tiny shadows flickering everywhere over the submerged rocks. Over each individual cone, a feathered plume is regularly thrust out and drawn back within the slightly opened portals of the central door—the rhythmic motions by which the barnacle sweeps in diatoms and other microscopic life of the returning sea.

  The creature inside each shell is something like a small pinkish shrimp that lies head downward, firmly cemented to the base of this chamber it cannot leave. Only the appendages are ever exposed—six pairs of branched, slender wands, jointed and set with bristles. Acting together, they form a net of great efficiency.

  The barnacle belongs to the group of arthropods known as the Crustacea, a varied horde including the lobsters, crabs, sand hoppers, brine shrimps, and water fleas. The barnacle is different from all related forms, however, in its fixed and sedentary existence. When and how it assumed such a way of life is one of the riddles of zoology, the transitional forms having been lost somewhere in the mists of the past. Some faint suggestions of a similar manner of life—the waiting in a fixed place for the sea to bring food—are found among the amphipods, another group of crustaceans. Some of these spin little webs or cocoons of natural silk and seaweed fibers; though remaining free to come and go they spend much of their time within them, taking their food from the currents. Another amphipod, a Pacific coast species, burrows into colonies of the tunicate called the sea pork, hollowing out for itself a chamber in the tough, translucent substance of its host. Lying in this excavation, it draws currents of sea water over its body and extracts the food.

  However the barnacle became what it is, its larval stages clearly proclaim its crustacean ancestry, although early zoologists who looked at its hard shells labeled it a mollusk. The eggs develop inside the parent's shell and presently hatch into the sea in milky clouds of larvae. (The British zoologist Hilary Moore, after studying barnacles on the Isle of Man, estimated a yearly production of a million million larvae from a little over half a mile of shore.) Larval life lasts about three months in the rock barnacle, with several molts and transformations of form. At first the larva, a little swimming creature called a nauplius, is indistinguishable from the larva of all other crustaceans. It is nourished by large globules of fat that not only feed it but keep it near the surface. As the fat globules dwindle, the larva begins to swim at lower water levels. Eventually it changes shape, acquires a pair of shells, six pairs of swimming legs, and a pair of antennae tipped with suckers. This "cypris" larva looks much like the adults of another group of crustaceans, the ostracods. Finally, guided by instinct to yield to gravity and to avoid light, it descends to the bottom ready to become an adult.

  No one knows how many of the baby barnacles riding shoreward on the waves make a safe landing, how many fail in the quest for a clean, hard substratum. The settling down of a barnacle larva is not a haphazard process, but is performed only after a period of seeming deliberation. Biologists who have observed the act in the laboratory say the larvae "walk" about on the substratum for as long as an hour, pulling themselves along by the adhesive tips of the antennae, testing and rejecting many possible sites before they make a final choice. In nature they probably drift along in the currents for many days, coming down, examining the bottom at hand, then drifting on to another.

  What are the conditions this infant creature requires? Probably it finds rock surfaces that are rough and pitted better than very smooth ones; probably it is repelled by a slimy film of microscopic plants, or even sometimes by the presence of hydroids or large algae. There is some reason to believe it may be drawn to existing colonies of barnacles perhaps through mysterious chemical attraction, detecting substances released by the adults and following these paths to the colony. Somehow, suddenly and irrevocably, the choice is made and the young barnacle cements itself to the chosen surface. Its tissues undergo a complete and drastic reorganization comparable to the metamorphosis of the larval butterfly. Then from an almost shapeless mass, the rudiments of the shell appear, the head and appendages are molded, and within twelve hours the complete cone of the shell, with all its plates delineated, has been formed.

  Within its cup of lime the barnacle faces a dual growth problem. As a crustacean enclosed in a chitinous shell, the animal itself must periodically shed its unyielding skin so that its body may enlarge. Difficult as it seems, this feat is successfully accomplished, as I am reminded many times each summer. Almost every container of sea water that I bring up from the shore is flecked with white semitransparent objects, gossamer-fine, like the discarded garments of some very small fairy creature. Seen under the microscope, every detail of structure is perfectly represented. Evidently the barnacle accomplishes its withdrawal from the old skin with incredible neatness and thoroughness. In the little cellophane-like replicas I can count the joints of the appendages; even the bristles, growing at the bases of the joints, seem to have been slipped intact out of their casings.

  The second problem is that of enlarging the hard cone to accommodate the growing body. Just how this is done no one seems to be sure, but probably there is some chemical secretion to dissolve the inner layers of the shell as new material is added on the outside.

  Unless its life is prematurely ended by an enemy, a rock barnacle is likely to live about three years in the middle and lower tidal zones, or five years near the upper tidal levels. It can withstand high temperatures as rocks absorb the heat of the summer sun. Winter cold in itself is not harmful, but grinding ice may scrape the rocks clean. The pounding of the surf is part of the normal life of a barnacle; the sea is not its enemy.

  When, through the attacks of fish, predatory worms, or snails, or through natural causes, the barnacle's life comes to an end, the shells remain attached to the rocks. These become shelter for many
of the minute beings of the shore. Besides the baby periwinkles that regularly live there, the little tide-pool insects often hurry into these shelters if caught by the rising tide. And lower on the shore, or in tide pools, the empty shells are likely to house young anemones, tube worms, or even new generations of barnacles.

  The chief enemy of the barnacle on these shores is a brightly colored carnivorous marine snail, the dog whelk. Although it preys also on mussels and even occasionally on periwinkles, it seems to prefer barnacles to all other food, probably because they are more easily eaten. Like all snails, the whelk possesses a radula. This is not used, periwinkle fashion, to scrape the rocks, but to drill a hole in any hard-shelled prey. It can then be pushed through the hole it has made, to reach and consume the soft parts within. To devour a barnacle, however, the whelk need only envelop the cone within its fleshy foot and force the valves open. It also produces a secretion that may have a narcotic effect. This is a substance called purpurin. In ancient times the secretion of a related snail in the Mediterranean was the source of the dye Tyrian purple. The pigment is an organic compound of bromine that changes in air to form a purple coloring matter.

  Although violent surf excludes them, the dog whelks appear in numbers on most open shores, working up high into the zone of the barnacles and mussels. By their voracious feeding they may actually alter the balance of life on the shore. There is a story, for example, about an area where the whelks had reduced the number of barnacles so drastically that mussels came in to fill the vacant niche. When the whelks could find no more barnacles they moved over to the mussels. At first they were clumsy, not knowing how to eat the new food. Some spent futile days boring holes in empty shells; others climbed into empty shells and bored from inside. In time, however, they adjusted to the new prey and ate so many mussels that the colony began to dwindle. Then the barnacles settled anew on the rocks and in the end the snails returned to them.