Life's a beach
The landscape down at the beach today resembled a scene from some sort of disaster movie - huge lumps of kelp roots flung all along the tide-line, almost obscuring the sand. You can always tell when there's been a big storm out at sea!
At first glance all you notice is large lumps of brown something with fronds of seaweed attached, but if you look carefully there are marvellous details... I know little about seaweed, so I'm extrapolating from the debris on the beach, but small plants anchor themselves to rocks with a web of roots, from which grows a stem - but these root balls can be HUGE - the size of a football, and they're quite impressive, strewn all over the beach! And then there are the sponges. Large clusters of dense, finger-like sponges grow together, anchored to a rock, and they get ripped off by the storm tides and thrown up on to the beach as well. Initially they look quite boring: a sort of dull, olive-algae gree, but here and there you see shiny patches of bright mauve and a pearly lilac, which are the smashed-open shells of barnacle colonies that attach themselves to the sponges. Other sponges arrive on the beach too: soft, pale yellow ones that look like brain corrugations, and today - the only time I've seen one - a beautiful, foot-long cylindrical sponge with a tiny cellular texture that was formed into deep honey-combs. It looked like some exotic fruit, perfectly shaped, and washed up. I'd have kept it, only I know that they begin to smell very quickly!
Occasionally you can see bright patches of red: sometimes it's algae on a rock, sometimes it's a small piece of brightly coloured seaweed, but mostly it is the small balls of sea urchins: fresh ones with their spines still attached, or sea-washed old ones which are hollow.
In some ways I find less washed up on the beach than I might have expected, when I came here. There's not much rubblish, thankfully, but also few shells. I suspect that the currents around here mean that most shells are smashed to smithereens by the time they arrive on the beach, for the 'gravel' is largely shell fragments... but today I also came upon a patch of what I thought was gravel but it turned out to be lots of tiny, complete shells. I've just excavated a handful from my pocket - I always have a pocket, down at the beach, just in case! - and I've come out with a lovely dark-green spiky fragment of crustacean shell, which is a beautiful clotted, creamy colour on the inside, with a bubbly texture. It's still got a fringe of bright orange hairs along one edge, suggesting it's part of an articulated flange from a tail joint, perhaps. Then there's a polished fragment of abalone, two striped cowrie shells, a small cream-and-red cone shell about the size of my thumb nail, and a twisty snail shell in smart black-and-white checks. Then two dark buey-green snail shells with a pearlescent finish, and a worn limpet whose shell has been eroded so that it's almost star-shaped.
I wished I'd had a camera there today to capture it all, particularly one piece of seaweed that I almost trod on. It had a collection of eggs attached to one side, and they were the most beautiful shape: they were slightly flattened cylinders, extending a good inch out from the weed, and packed tightly together so they were tessellated. A few stragglers were sprinked off along one edge, but the main group were tightly bunched. Each egg was a sort of rubbery white colour, with a tiny hole on the flat top of the egg. Sad, in a way, that they weren't going to hatch, but beautiful! I wonder what they were?
At first glance all you notice is large lumps of brown something with fronds of seaweed attached, but if you look carefully there are marvellous details... I know little about seaweed, so I'm extrapolating from the debris on the beach, but small plants anchor themselves to rocks with a web of roots, from which grows a stem - but these root balls can be HUGE - the size of a football, and they're quite impressive, strewn all over the beach! And then there are the sponges. Large clusters of dense, finger-like sponges grow together, anchored to a rock, and they get ripped off by the storm tides and thrown up on to the beach as well. Initially they look quite boring: a sort of dull, olive-algae gree, but here and there you see shiny patches of bright mauve and a pearly lilac, which are the smashed-open shells of barnacle colonies that attach themselves to the sponges. Other sponges arrive on the beach too: soft, pale yellow ones that look like brain corrugations, and today - the only time I've seen one - a beautiful, foot-long cylindrical sponge with a tiny cellular texture that was formed into deep honey-combs. It looked like some exotic fruit, perfectly shaped, and washed up. I'd have kept it, only I know that they begin to smell very quickly!
Occasionally you can see bright patches of red: sometimes it's algae on a rock, sometimes it's a small piece of brightly coloured seaweed, but mostly it is the small balls of sea urchins: fresh ones with their spines still attached, or sea-washed old ones which are hollow.
In some ways I find less washed up on the beach than I might have expected, when I came here. There's not much rubblish, thankfully, but also few shells. I suspect that the currents around here mean that most shells are smashed to smithereens by the time they arrive on the beach, for the 'gravel' is largely shell fragments... but today I also came upon a patch of what I thought was gravel but it turned out to be lots of tiny, complete shells. I've just excavated a handful from my pocket - I always have a pocket, down at the beach, just in case! - and I've come out with a lovely dark-green spiky fragment of crustacean shell, which is a beautiful clotted, creamy colour on the inside, with a bubbly texture. It's still got a fringe of bright orange hairs along one edge, suggesting it's part of an articulated flange from a tail joint, perhaps. Then there's a polished fragment of abalone, two striped cowrie shells, a small cream-and-red cone shell about the size of my thumb nail, and a twisty snail shell in smart black-and-white checks. Then two dark buey-green snail shells with a pearlescent finish, and a worn limpet whose shell has been eroded so that it's almost star-shaped.
I wished I'd had a camera there today to capture it all, particularly one piece of seaweed that I almost trod on. It had a collection of eggs attached to one side, and they were the most beautiful shape: they were slightly flattened cylinders, extending a good inch out from the weed, and packed tightly together so they were tessellated. A few stragglers were sprinked off along one edge, but the main group were tightly bunched. Each egg was a sort of rubbery white colour, with a tiny hole on the flat top of the egg. Sad, in a way, that they weren't going to hatch, but beautiful! I wonder what they were?
posted by Sara Bowen at 12:40 am
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