Sunset beach

Beaches represent opposites of comfort for people. Either sunny holiday places when the wind doesn’t blow, where surfers and sun tanners hang out, and the ice cream is good, it all representing bliss. Or they are inhospitable sand strips next to sea or lake where cold winds reign and waves wear down everything, including stone to pebble, then sand. From enjoyment beaches turn into challenges, escalate unexpectedly to threats and suffering. Fickle weather it is that turns the one into the other without warning.

Beaches are usually narrow, sloping strips of land along the edges of oceans, lakes and rivers, covered in sand, pebbles, rocks or fragments of seashell. All the parts are products of erosion and weathering, all becoming continually smaller, sand the destination of them all. Over many years the continual action of the waves pushes rocky cliffs back imperceptibly by the smallest of decrements. The sand accumulates along the littoral, to be washed or blown away to unknown destinations above or below the water level, grain by grain.

To the uninitiated this may appear like a patch of empty sand. Not so! Life of a different ilk is lived here by little seen beasties, as robust as in a tropical forest, albeit on a small scale. These worldwide ecosystem strips called beaches are rich in nutrients and attractive under different conditions to different species. Home to a variety of organisms not bent on ice cream, surfers or tanning, beaches are alive with interspecies events including eating each other.

The intertidal or littoral zone where land meets sea between high and low tide, in different places at different times, is replete with favourite spots visited and lived in by numerous animals adapted in untold ways. They burrow in the sand, shelter under or attach to rocks, assume and change colour or cover because it helps.

The zone sees much action of people and animals, a bit like an airport, a railway station or an international hotel. Whatever breathes may come here at times, many soon to depart again, some inside something that had them for dinner. The longer one stays on the beach, the stronger one’s capacity for coping with changes from dry to wet, freezing to scorching, salinity of seawater to runoff from rain or rivulet, not to speak of the turbulence of water and wind, or the ducking of predators.

Meeting mates is another beach activity of the two-edged sword type, as some mates suddenly turn into predators. This holds for all species on the intra- and interspecies levels. All this information helps to avoid being eaten, or the opposite, finding food among tasty fellow beach combers, some doubling up as prospective diners or dinners. Hard learning when the range of shapes, sizes (and tastes) of those hanging out along the edges of two worlds is so vast! If one’s innocence isn’t lost soon enough, one might be half digested before the vital point is taken.