Beaches and coastlines: what do you see?

Rachana Rao

I come from one of the busiest cities lying along the western coast of India, a city that never sleeps. Her people are her lifeline. The rich and the poor, all clubbed together when they are addressed as Mumbaikars. The trains are so crowded that by the time you push through the sea of people and reach the doors, your station would have already passed by, forcing you to get off at the next station. While I like this hustle and bustle of the city, I have also come to crave solitude and quietness. I found my peace in nature – in watching the birds and identifying them, in listening to the waves crash on the rocks near Haji Ali, in sticking my head into every tide pool looking for a nudibranch or sea slug. My frequent escapades drove my curiosity and led me to take up wildlife biology and research as my profession.

For the past three years, I have been working on marine plants called seagrasses. They are the only true marine plants, as in they are similar to terrestrial plants complete with leaves, shoots, roots, flowers and seeds. I sample the intertidal zone – the region that falls between the high tide and low tide marks – along the coasts of the Andaman Islands, snorkelling and walking for several hours a day. When I was asked to write about beaches and coastlines, however, I couldn’t skip the coasts of Mumbai. These coasts characterize the city and her people, who in turn redefine them. Beaches and coasts are not merely the land by the sea, but what humans and their natural inhabitants make of them – how we perceive them, what we derive from them and how they respond to our actions.

For many, their perception of the coast is a picture of beauty and vastness, leaving them with a sense of peace and satisfaction. The bright blue waters through the day that reflect the vibrant hues of pink and yellow from a setting sun at the horizon, while one lies on the shimmering sand watching a crab scurry by. As you start to walk on the wet sand, feeling it crunch beneath your feet, the cool ocean breeze brushes your face bringing in the scent of the sea. While the saltwater itself is odourless, this smell is of a chemical compound called Dimethyl sulphide, which emanates from the marine algae residing in the sea. An otherwise absolutely disgusting odour, in lower concentrations, becomes the pleasant ocean smell. This, coupled with the occasional gust of wind whistling over the rocks, in the backdrop of whispers as the waves break upon the beach, is tantamount to relaxation.

Apart from their cultural significance, these wetland habitats play a vital role in performing some of the most important regulatory ecosystem functions. The coastline acts as the first line of defence during a passing storm or cyclone. The beach breaks down the large thunderous waves, while the surrounding vegetation acts like a wind-breaker, cutting down wind speeds. They mitigate floods, prevent soil erosion and store vital nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous. They act as massive carbon sinks, especially when vegetated with mangroves or seagrasses, sequestering large amounts of atmospheric carbon. The oxygen deficient layers of the coastal soil further aid in storing these sinks for several thousand years.

Despite their critical role in providing these crucial services, these systems are thought of as wastelands. The picturesque idea of coastlines is far from reality in most places. Any open space – like the beaches in this case – becomes a dumping ground and any water body is where a sewage outlet is opened into. You have to squint your eyes as the sunrays reflect from the plastic garbage on the shores and tip-toe through abandoned fishing nets washed ashore as they trap and suffocate every creature there is. You take a deep breath only to smell the filth around. With every passing day, we are losing these habitats – dredged, reclaimed and converted in the name of development and urbanization. If this continues, we will not be able to save these valuable habitats, let alone fulfil the global green targets for mitigating climate change.

Although in theory I was well acquainted with this reality, only when I stepped out of the four walls of my room did, I notice what it actually meant. As my friend Farai describes, “When each handful of sand unearths hidden organisms, each wave uncovers hundreds of clams, snails and crabs that disappear as quickly as they appear, all caught in the seemingly endless cycle of wave crashing upon the shore, is when one can tell that the beach is thriving and its sands rich with life.”

As I walked with my colleagues, Evan and Phoolmani, in the Pokkadera Bay in Middle Andamans, it all made sense. The coasts offer a significant biological service accommodating and nursing a vast diversity of life and their interactions. They support a variety of plants, animals, microorganisms and soil, either encrusting the rocks or crammed inside their crevices, buried under the sand or swimming freely in the seawater.

Inhabitants belonging to different phyla peeped out to say ‘hello’ and quickly scuttled off. Mudskippers, a family of fish that have adapted to survive both in and out of water, skidded on the water surface to climb onto a distant rock as they saw us approaching. Warty slugs as sluggish as they are, seated on the algae laden rock, relied on their camouflage to remain unnoticed. As we hopped from one rock to the next near the mouth of a brackish water channel, we reached the mangroves, their breathing roots sticking out and propagules anchoring into the soil. Interspersed were the fiddler crabs, the males fighting each other to claim the burrow and the mate. Every showdown, a remarkable sight to watch.

A jump onto the sandy parts of the shore, which covered a large portion of the bay was a peek into yet another spectacular ecosystem. A system inhabited by 6 of the 65 species of marine flowering plants known globally, making it a highly diverse seagrass meadow. Its topography as diverse, with some areas such as the sand bars created by tidal action while others engineered by the residents of the meadow. The sand bars, or what we refer to as the football ground – since kids come by to play football – house an array of species. If one looks closely, one will find tubes of cemented sand grains made by marine polychaete worms such as the sand mason worm, feather duster worm and towers of sand made by crabs. A tiny soft bodied hermit crab inspected shells of marine snails to make its home until it found a new, better and safer conch to live in, while an army of soldier crabs marching by, buried themselves into the substrate.

The pistol shrimps dug burrows to move in with the gobies while leaving heaps of sand or mounds alongside giving the ocean floor an undulating look. The seagrass blades along with coarse substrate or coral rubble make for the perfect hiding ground for several juvenile fishes. On the contrary, octopuses, that are otherwise exceptional in camouflage, made their presence felt. They would leave behind the shells and other remains from their last meal to adorn their burrow openings making them quite conspicuous.

With every step, we would stumble upon life – marine sponges, corals, starfish, sea urchins, giant clams, sea cucumbers. On occasion, we were greeted by green sea turtles, guitar fish, banded snake mimicking eels while several species of shore birds including curlew, whimbrel, plovers, sandpipers and the endemic Andaman teal and the screeching raptor – the Andaman fish eagle – regularly accompanied us on these walks.

The ecological role of these wetlands further translates to a fundamental service they provide to mankind – fisheries. Yet for a fisherwoman it is more than a monetary relationship that she has with the sea. Getting a decent catch and bringing home food for family is not all that it is. She read the moon and the stars, the wind and the tides, the eddies and the currents, the behaviour and the ecology, all weaved together in the stories about her voyages and fishing experiences.

Like for the fisherwoman, it was not good enough to know how to fish, but also where and when to fish, similarly, as a student, it is not just about learning to access information from different sources, but also to develop the creativity to put this knowledge to use. While a textbook and hopefully this write-up will do the job of familiarizing one with this subject, the curiosity to get out, observe and experience the coasts is of paramount importance. As we all perceive the beaches based on our past experiences and the utility we assign to them, a new outlook and a fresh lens will only increase our understanding of these systems.

As Yoayela, my fisherman friend on the islands, who has lived near the coast all his life, spanned the entire archipelago in his dinghy and seen the coasts far and wide, shared a new excitement one day. He came with his 5-year-old son, Kain, for the first time to the beach. As he heard the boy’s feet splashing in the water, little Kain, cheering heartily, Yoayela sat beside us depicting this experience onto a paper. You could tell that the way he perceived the beach that day was different from the other days, something he will cherish for life.

Beach activities Here’s how you can explore and learn more about beaches. 1. If you are close to the sea, the coasts are easily accessible. Take your students out on beach walks. Watch the fisherman waiting for his big catch, observe the myriad organisms beneath your feet, listen to the roar of the waves. Let the students share and discuss what they hear and see. How does each of your students perceive the beach? Do they all see the beach in the same way? What excites them the most? 2. While at the beach, let the children make a note of the creatures they come across. What are they? How do they look and where do they live? Watch them to know what they are doing. Let them illustrate and log these in their journals regularly. Some occasional art and craft to beautify the entries will make it all the more interesting. Origami is a great start. Try your hand at making an Origami crab or starfish. You will find video tutorials and websites that can teach you how. How about creating art from beach trash? Not only will you clean the beach but also beautify it. The students can get together with the art teacher and come up with ideas to create art from trash. 3. Conducting or even participating in beach clean-up drives to help restore these systems to their original glory is of paramount importance. It will help sensitize the students to the threats these systems face. This will have a domino effect and shape how they view these landscapes. 4. If you are not living close to the sea, there are still ways to experience it. One can learn a lot about any habitat from books, by talking to people or watching documentaries. Have any of the children in class been to a beach? Let them share their experiences. Podcasts and documentaries are another way to learn about beaches. ‘Our planet – Coastal Seas’, ‘Blue planet 2 – Coasts’, ‘The Octopus teacher’, ‘Puff – wonders of the reef’ are a few documentaries that teachers can show their students. Watching these in groups and writing short summaries will make this a fun and knowledge inducing activity. 5. If you want a more sensorial experience how about creating your own beach? If the school has a large ground, the students can convert a portion of it into a beach. Or they can create beach gardens in a corner of their balcony or terrace. The internet is full of websites of how you can bring the beach to you. 6. For those who don’t have access to the internet, you can still experience the beach. Buy some sand and pebbles and let you students feel them under their feet. You get conches to buy, or if you have them at home from a trip to a sea, bring them to class and let you students listen to the conch. Can they hear the waves of the sea?

The author is a marine biologist at the Nature Conservation Foundation and is currently working on seagrass species organization and community assembly in the meadows of the Andaman archipelago. She can be reached at rachana@ncf-india.org.