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Students surveying the tidepools on Duxbury Reef
I went tidepooling yestertoday. Or rather, I drove a group of students--my youngest among them--out to Duxbury Reef in Bolinas to do a tidepool wildlife survey. Kathy Soave, marine biology teacher and chair of the Branson science department, has been bringing teams of kids out to monitor the biodiversity of the so-called reef for the past decade for a project called Sustainable Seas.
Aside from anchoring one end of the 100-meter surveying tape, watching hermit crabs bumble around in their borrowed shells, and pondering how the best laid plans of crabs and men gang aft aglee, there wasn't a whole lot to do. While the kids got out grids and counted limpets, snails, and sea anemones, I thought about another time that I'd gone tidepooling.
It was back before my wife and I were married. My dad had just retired. He loved to sail, and had always dreamed of sailing in the South Pacific, and so he and my mom brought my brother, me, and my then-fiancée down to the Vava'u archipelago in Tonga. It's essentially one enormous atoll of atolls--linked rings of coral rising out of the middle of the blue, ill-named Pacific. There's one port town--Vava'u--and a few villages scattered among the islands, but it is (or at least, in 1989, was) mostly a tropical paradise.
We'd been sailing for about a week when we reached the islands furthest from Vava'u. After some reef swimming in the lagoon, Maura and I decided to take a walk along the reef that connected the two outermost islands. The ocean rolled out beyond the reef, but within the confines of the atoll, all was calm. The tide was low, and the reef was exposed, leaving a bridge between the islands dotted with tidepools. At one, we saw a young Tongalese boy--perhaps six or seven--standing over a pool, staring down with a look of wonder on his face. He waved us over and pointed down at the pool.
It didn't look any different than any of the dozens of other small puddles that spattered the coral bridge--a couple of dead leaves floating in the water. When we shrugged questioningly at him, he pointed down again emphatically, and we knelt.
As we looked closer, we realized that what we had taken for dead leaves--gold and brown, floating apparently aimlessly in the water--were drifting around each other through the clear water. And it became obvious as we watched that they were moving under their own power, though they were emulating the floating of the leaves that they so resembled.
It was two tiny, beautiful fish, each no bigger than a postage stamp, perfectly camouflaged, perfectly suited to their environment. A spectacular triumph of natural selection.
It wasn't until later that we realized that we should have gotten a camera and taken a picture.
A few days later, when we returned to port, we told the gentleman who rented the boats about the two leaf fish, and asked him what they were called. He raised his eyebrows and said he'd never heard of them, though he'd lived in the islands for years, and that, as we might be the first people ever to have seen them--that we might have discovered a new species.
Well, we said, the kid saw them before us, or we'd never have noticed them.
Standing on Duxbury Reef, listening to the seagulls and the waves, I was struck by what a rich thing life is, by its infinite variety.