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It is with gratitude and excitement that I am bringing “Intertidal” to the Harpswell Anchor, a paper I wrote for regularly several years ago and have always eagerly read.
My previous pieces in this paper were about a variety of community issues, all marine-related in some way, but with a more informational format. “Intertidal,” however, is a regular space where, for nearly 10 years in The Times Record, I have explored any number of topics that connect the land to the sea and the human to the natural.
As the definition of “intertidal” describes, this space is the between space, the connective place, and, to me, that means many things. It can be scientific, visual, cultural, poetic or historical. The common thread is this incredibly unique place where we live, here on the coast. It has the power to draw people and not let them go, myself included, and to spark curiosity that is unbounded.
After the more than 350 “Intertidal” columns I have written, I do not find it hard to come up with new topics. Sometimes these ideas stem from my own observations, but often they come from others who pose questions I never thought to ask. I am eager to hear your questions and to get to know this community of readers.
But first, I promised the readers of The Times Record in my last column in that publication that I would follow up on a theme in my first column here. I wrote about Eric Carle’s picture book, “A House for a Hermit Crab” — how it describes the importance of building a community that supports you, and how sometimes you have to leave one home behind in hopes of building a new one. As Carle’s hermit crab says as he looks for a new shell and new friends, “Oh, there are so many possibilities! I can’t wait to get started!”
And so, I will get started by drawing upon another of Carle’s stories, “Mister Seahorse.” This is a timely choice, since this column is being published during June, the month when we celebrate fathers. You may not know that we have seahorses in Maine. Although they certainly are not as ubiquitous as hermit crabs, they do live here.
The Hippocampus erectus, known as the lined or spotted seahorse, is not very big. They typically range from 5-7 inches in length and are a variety of colors depending on their environment. That is one of their specialties — to change color and pattern to camouflage themselves in their habitat. Carle illustrates this by creating transparent backgrounds like seaweed or rocks that the reader can overlay on various sea creatures.
It is another seahorse specialty, however, that Carle highlights in this book — the fact that male seahorses, not females, carry eggs and “give birth” to young. The females deposit eggs into the pouch of the male, where they develop for several weeks before he pushes them out as tiny babies.
Seahorses do this because, without having to invest energy in caring for the eggs, the females can produce another batch right away so they are ready immediately after the father gives birth. The only other animals to do this are the seahorse’s close relatives — pipefish and dragonfish.
But there are a few other animals for whom the father is the primary caregiver of the young. Like the hermit crab, who looks for friends in his community, so too does Mister Seahorse. In the story, he meets fellow fathers like the leaf fish, who carries eggs on his head; the tilapia, who carries eggs in his mouth; and the bullhead, who guards his newborn babies. They all share their strategies and experiences.
In the end, Mister Seahorse gives birth to a bunch of tiny baby seahorses who will find their own friends and create their own communities in the ocean. Like so many sea creatures, seahorses are unpredictably odd and remarkably different from ourselves, yet they live just beyond the intertidal in a world we are drawn to explore over and over. I look forward to continuing this exploration here.
