Low Tide
Diane Richards

“Are we killing them?” Claire asked, as we our stepped upon the aggregating anemones that spread like a wet, gray carpet over the rocks exposed at low tide. Compressed, the animals were difficult to see, their voluptuous tentacles hidden beneath sheathes of coarse sand and shell rubble, protection from the desiccating sun and wind. But not from curious humans: we could feel them squish beneath our tennis shoes as we picked our way across the tide pool flats.

The young girl’s worried eyes scanned first Marti, her mother, and then me, the former Tide Pool Educator at the Steinhart Aquarium. “No, I don’t think so.” I was guessing. “All tide pool life is very hardy.”

Somehow I’d expected to see more life. The fat brown pisaster was our first good find—and the only sea star we saw during our first two hours on the rocks. I wondered whether it had foraged beyond its range in the intertidal zone, whether the isolation was somehow fatal.

It clung tightly to the rocky substrate when I lifted it for Claire. I wanted her to see the tube feet. “Sea stars and sea urchins,” I told her, “are both echinoderms,” and thus related. Earlier we'd held a shard of an urchin test up to the sky to see how sunlight poked through tiny holes in the skeleton. I'd explained that in the pattern of light, she could see where threadlike feet once protruded and wiggled amongst a living creature's spines.

As I pulled a pebble away from the creamy underside of the sea star’s arm, several of its tube feet tore off, still clinging to the rocks. I felt a little sick as I heard the ripping sound, then anger at my big clumsy hands, my human willfulness, my inability to let be. I set the star down, knowing that it could regenerate the missing parts, repair the damage, but I was also keenly aware of how vulnerable a life is once outside its element. How fragile in careless hands.

We walked for at least another hour. Claire and Marti wanted to find more sea stars. Marti split off from Claire and me and soon came upon a rich cache of sea stars; a lovely pink leather star, several more ochres. “Over here,” she waved to us. Claire poked underneath the eelgrass. “I really want to find a sea star,” she told me.

“I think this might be a good place,” I told her as I pointed to a rocky hollow where I could see the radial pattern of tiny white nubbins running down five chocolate brown spokes gently rising from the sand. Bent-kneed, Claire peered into the shadows. “I found one!” she called out, beaming.

Next we looked for fish and found tiny tide pool sculpin and shrimp in the deeper pools. We leaned over a puddle clear as gin, watched a squat anemone blossom, its celadon petals quivering, fingering the water for things human eyes might miss.

I felt better as we went our separate ways, headed for home. It seemed at first that the lone dark ochre star was a stranding, and this had made me sad. I keep forgetting that all tide pool creatures are strandings, all of them alone briefly. So easy to focus on the isolation, when yards away there were several sea stars; a community.

A vast network of small and vulnerable creatures—all waiting for the tide.

Just like us.



Diane Richards lives close to California’s Monterey Bay, where she works as web content writer/developer for TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Pelagics), a tagging project of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.