Life on the Edge

Confessions of a Beachcomber
August 2008
by Nancy Sefton

I am bent over double, unable to stop a steady slide down a slope of green slime, tennies soaking, shoulders in knots. Add a sniffley nose, blue hands, and legs that collapse like a folding chair when I try to stand after hours of crouching. Without warning, Puget Sound sends an occasional scout wave to lick hungrily at my cold, wet feet. This is heaven.

At the right time and place, marine animals representing every biological group found in the sea are showcased for local shoreline hikers. Some creatures become dormant when exposed, their shells closed like trap doors to await the return of the sea. Others occupy shallow pools and remain submerged during the lowest tides, carrying on their normal lifestyles, defending themselves, trying to gobble each other up, even reproducing. Many animals lie hidden beneath sand, mud or cobbles, frustratingly beyond our view.

For its inhabitants, the intertidal zone is a tough neighborhood. It features wide temperature and salinity variations, periodic drying, and occasional heavy waves. Despite the conditions, a huge variety of animals lay claim to this inhospitable real estate. The intertidal zone is the maritime equivalent of downtown. In fact, things get so crowded that it's literally Standing Room Only for some residents like mussels, barnacles and oysters.

The tenacity of intertidal dwellers comes in many forms: clinging feet, suction cups, gripping fibres, custom shell shapes, rubber necks, impregnable armor, a camel-like tolerance for the hot sun.

On the edge of a shallow, rock-strewn pool, I sit quietly waiting for something to happen. Shortly the bottom debris begins to stir. What appeared to be small dark pebbles suddenly sprout jointed legs and lurch across the bottom – hermit crabs dragging their borrowed snail shells, like RVs, as they forage for food.


Keyhole limpet with encrusting coralline algae.


Living moon snail burrowing into mud bottom.

Sea stars grip the rocks with tiny suction cups on the ends of their tube feet. The strongest waves fail to dislodge them. The Pacific's colorful five-rayed ochre starfish is the Jesse Owens of the intertidal zone, a voracious carnivore that "gallops" across the exposed shore, shamelessly gorging itself in the high mussel and barnacle beds.

From rocky nooks, anemones blossom like chrysanthemums, some open and inviting, others closed upon themselves. Actually carnivorous animals, these flower look-alikes can be fatal, their poisonous tentacles spread to seduce the unwary. A tiny blue crab goes down for the third time into the gullet of an anemone, only the victim's claw emerging in a last silent plea for help.
As one wanders down the rugged shore, the sea delights in offering a hint here, a clue there, tantalizing fragments tossed up to lie scattered on the mind. The molted crab's abandoned shell is a half-told tale. The mussels and barnacles, their doors closed to strangers, keep their secrets until the waters rise. The spent heap of kelp piled upon the rocks beneath a buzzing cloud of insects alludes to a drowned forest, its canopy afloat on the far surface like a girl's hair. An empty snail shell, the sea's refuse, is an object of desire.

At each tiny pool I’ve stared through the sea's looking glass into an intriguing world I can never be part of. The tide turns at last and water flows like a transfusion into nooks and channels, bringing renewal. As the sea returns, intertidal residents resume their normal lifestyles, while I, the uninvited, retreat to higher ground.