Through young eyes

On the penultimate day of 2020 I met up with my goddaughter, Katherine, and her family up at Pigeon Point to have two adventures. The first one was to find a marble that had been hidden a part of a game. We got skunked on that one, although the marble was found after we left and the hider had sent an additional clue. The second adventure was an excursion to the tidepools. I’ve had a lackadaisical attitude towards the afternoon low tides this winter, not feeling enthusiastic about heading out with all of the people and the wind and having to fight darkness. But the invitation to join the marble hunt, on a day with a decent low tide, meant that I could spend a good deal of quality time with Katherine.

It is not unusual for a promising low tide to be cancelled out by a big swell. It happens, especially during winter’s combination of afternoon lows and occasional storms. The swell yesterday was pretty big.

Here’s the view to the north, from Pigeon Point:

All that whitewash breaking over the rocks is not good for tidepooling, especially with small kids in tow.

This is how things looked to the south of the point:

This is Whaler’s Cove, a sandy beach that lies on the leeward side of the point itself. See how the water is much calmer? It’s amazing how different the two sides of the point are, in terms of hydrography, wind, and biota. The south side is much easier to get to, especially for newbies or people who are less steady on their feet. Being sheltered from the brunt of the prevailing southbound current means that the biological diversity is, shall we say, a bit subdued when compared to what we see on the north side of the point.

I first took Katherine tidepooling when her sister, Lizzie, was an infant riding in her mom’s backpack. Katherine was about four at the time. Her mom and I were suprised at how much she remembered. She recognized the anemones right away, even the closed up cloning anemones (Anthopleura elegantissima) on the high rocks. She remembered to avoid stepping on them—that’s my girl!

She wasn’t all that keen on touching the anemones, though, even after we told her it feels like touching tape.

She did like the sea stars, too. Purple is my favorite color and I think hers, too, so the purple and orange ochre stars were a hit. It was nice to see two large healthy ones.

I had some actual collecting to do, so it was a work trip for me. Late December is not the best time to collect algae, but I wanted to bring some edible seaweeds back to the lab to feed animals. We haven’t had any kelp brought in since the late summer, and urchins are very hungry. They will eat intertidal seaweeds, though, and when I go out to the tidepools I bring back what I can. It will be a couple of months until we see the algae growing towards their summer lushness, but even a few handfuls of sea lettuce will be welcome to hungry mouths.

Katherine and I walked up the beach for a little way to study one of the several large-ish crab corpses on the sand. This one was a molt rather than an actual corpse.

Katherine found the missing leg a little way off, and we discussed why we call these limbs legs instead of arms. “They use their claws to pinch things, like hands,” she said. Not wanting to get into a discussion of serial homology and crustacean evolution with a 6-year-old, I told her that calling the claws “hands” isn’t a bad idea, since they are used a lot like the way we use our hands. But, I continued, the crab walks on its other limbs like we walk with our legs, so can we call those legs? She was happy to agree with that. I can tell I will have to be careful about how I explain things to her, so that she doesn’t come up with some wonky ideas about how evolution works.

In the meantime, Lizzie, the little sister, was having a grand old time. She flooded her little boots without a complaint and, after her mom emptied the water from them, squelched happily along with soggy socks. That girl may very well grow up to be a marine biologist!

Once the sun went behind the cliff it started getting cold. With one child already wet we decided to head back. On our way up the beach we saw this thing, which I pointed out to Katherine:

“What is it?” she asked. When I asked what she thought it was she cocked her head to one said and said, “It looks like a rock.” Then I told her to touch it, which she didn’t want to do. So I picked it up and turned it over, to show her the underside:

These big gumboot chitons do look more interesting from this side, because you can at least see that they are probably some kind of animal. Katherine had seen some smaller chitons on the rocks, so she had some idea of what a chiton is, but these are so big that they don’t look anything like the ones we showed her earlier. Plus, with their shell plates being covered with a tough piece of skin and invisible, there are no outward signs that this bizarre thing is indeed a chiton. Katherine was not impressed.

At this time of year, when the sun decides to go down it goes down fast. But as we were walking back across the rocks the tide was at its lowest, so there was more terrain to explore. Then it was back up the stairs to the cars, where we could get warm and dry.

Oh, and Katherine and her mom and sister were able to find the hidden marble! They also hid one of their own for someone else to find.