The Sea Is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides
by Adam Nicolson

 
My knowledge of marine and aquatic life is, unfortunately, well below the threshold needed to motivate me to seek more knowledge on the subject—ignorance begets ignorance!

But the description of Adam Nicolson’s ‘The Sea Is Not Made of Water’ (2021) was so compelling that I took the plunge and will be ever grateful for the unabashed praise on the book’s cover.

‘The Sea Is Not Made of Water’ takes the reader through a delightful tour of the intricate beauty of inter-tidal ecology. Nicholson weaves tales of individual animals such as the Sandhopper, Prawn, Winkle, and Anemone with the bigger picture of the very raison d'être of tides and rocks ("If the tides are our twice-daily connection to the universe, the rocks are our ever-present library of time”), and the lives of scientists and philosophers, in the broadest sense of these terms, embedded in a constant narrative in the background of his own attempts to build artificial inter-tidal pools and observe the ecological succession of life forms. The subject matter of the book is absolutely fascinating, but there is much more.

The exquisite, almost poetic prose and the author’s philosophical inclinations on various matters made me bond with the book and its author as with a kindred spirit.

Early in the book, Nicolson writes:

“There is something about a pool which – not to make too gross a pun on it – encourages the reflective, leads the mind not merely to transcribe the experience of the actual, … but allows the questions of what its reality consists of. … There are no boundaries here. The human, the planetary and the animal all interact, and all of them are inter-leaved in the realities of the shore. … These categories blur: human life here, even human thought here, is identifiably animal; animals develop social and cognitive systems, means of attack and defence, hierarchy and cooperation, propagation and survival, that look strikingly like the ways human beings organise their lives and societies.”

Having said that, Nicolson goes on to justify his views with the assertion:

“This is not anthropomorphism – viewing the animal world according to terms more suitable to people – but its opposite: zoomorphism, recognising the continuities between animal and human consciousness, the continuousness of the spectrum that runs from bacterium and virus to scientist and poet.”

As if by virtue of some cosmic boon, I also found an unforgettable passage about social wasps! No inter-tidal creatures the social wasps surely are, but a great social wasp hero, Leo Pardi, became an equally great Sandhopper hero in the second innings of his career. In Nicolson’s inimitable words:

“All through the war and up until 1953, at the Zoological Institute of Pisa University, he [Leo Pardi] examined the habits of the paper wasps, in particular the ferocious struggles between a new colony’s would-be queens, who bit and clasped and clashed their antennae until one emerged triumphant (called marvellously the Nestmutter, the ‘nest mother’, by Karl von Frisch, the great Austrian biologist and bee expert who had guided Pardi towards this study) while the others either left or retreated into a subsidiary status, called by Frisch the Hilfsweibchen, the ‘little help wenches’, which were organised in ranks below the Nestmutter. Wasps it seemed had as much of a status hierarchy in their colony as hens or wolves. What Leo Pardi discovered, through hundreds of dissections, was an extraordinary interaction of that social status with the body form of the wasps. Somehow, the alpha wasp, perhaps by some kind of hormonal signal, was able to inhibit the development of ovaries in her rivals. She became fertile and her hormonal winds blowing over the colony ensured that her rivals remained barren. Pardi found that if a beta wasp was removed from the presence of the Nestmutter, the beta’s ovaries were able to develop quite normally and she could think of becoming a Nestmutter herself, hormonally depriving in her turn the gamma, delta and epsilon wasps of their chance to procreate, at least until they too were removed to their own colonies. A mental and social life usually associated only with hens, wolves and people had been found in the insects. Pardi published his discoveries in several international journals, encouraged by the great Dutch animal ethologist Niko Tinbergen and others, but in March 1950 his ideas were brutally attacked at a seminar in Paris by a French entomologist and Pardi, hurt and exhausted, withdrew from wasps to something he could make his own: intertidal creatures, in particular the sandhoppers which he found on the beaches of the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west of Pisa. In a pattern that repeats again and again in these stories, the edge of the sea was playing its part as a psychic refuge.”

I know of no social wasp researcher who has come close to describing wasp dominance hierarchies and their discovery (and discoverer) in such evocative terms.

Guido Caniglia, now the Director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Klosterneuburg, Austria, provides a fascinating account of Leo Pardi’s work on social wasps in “Understanding Societies from Inside the Organisms. Leo Pardi’s Work on Social Dominance in Polistes Wasps (1937–1952)”. J Hist Biol 48:455–486 (2015).

To be fair to Nicolson’s book, I will quote at least one of his many quotable gems that relate more directly to the subject matter of his book.

“Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but a constant and careful evaluation of the risk-reward ratios in every transaction. …The anemones were using ‘logical decision rules similar to those observed in contests in animals that are often assumed to be more complex in their behaviour’. Somehow, an anemone polyp can ask the strategic questions: is the other one stronger? Am I likely to lose? Will the cost of winning outweigh the benefit? Is discretion the better part of valour? Anemones, it seems, are logical polyps, capable of deference in front of the strong and assertion in front of the weak, and able in the light of those perceptions to conduct limited war. No one knows how, nor what kind of consciousness is alive in these animals. Perhaps anemones drive on to this far-reaching conclusion: there is no distinction between life and mind. Life is mind and there is no boundary in the continuum of life at which you can draw a line to say ‘Here is mind’ and ‘Here is none’. Life-and-mind is a single condition in which the living share. We are mind. We live in mind. To live is to be mind. Mind is the distinction between what lives and what doesn’t, so that thought, that stream of consciousnesses that ebbs and flows in us, is the medium of being.”

Nicholson’s view of nature and life has the potential to take the idea of nature conservation to a profoundly new philosophical realm.

“It is not that nature itself is valuable: he says. “There is no more value in it than there is in us. But the opportunity it provides to amend our consciousness, to remove the unending claims of the self, to deny the primacy of the self as anything more than a ripple in the general flux of the world, is a moment of education …”

Knowing who Adam Nicolson really is, skyrocketed my admiration for the author and his book. Adam Nicolson is not a mainstream academic scientist nor a typical science writer. He is 5th Baron Carnock, although he does not use the title, and is a journalist who has worked for the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Telegraph, National Geographic Magazine and Granta. His previous books include, On Foot: Guided Walks in England, France, and the United States (1990), Mrs Kipling: The Hated Wife (2001), God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (2003), The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (2014), The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and their Year of Marvels (2020), among many more. I did not know that they still make such polymaths. But I do know that nowadays, they make many narrow-minded readers who complain that ‘The Sea Is Not made of Water’ is neither an oceanography book, a philosophy text, nor a history book. But that is precisely why it is a great book and one that I highly recommend.

I posted a version of this on Face Book in August 2022.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57293234-the-sea-is-not-made-of-water?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=j8TqhHEQLW&rank=1

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