September 6, 2023

“We still go to the seaside for consolation and simplicity…but there are ironies in choosing the shore as a theatre for reassurance.  A tidal coast is filled with that paradoxical quality: reliable unreliability, both closed and open-ended, both familiar and strange. Regularity toys with uncertainty there…the intertidal is rich but troubled; as no coincidence, it is one of the most revelatory habitats on Earth…of all the great discoveries made in the science of nature, from a grasp of taxonomy, to the sequence of creatures through time revealed in the rocks, the adaptations of organisms to circumstance, the idea of natural selection…all these ways of understanding the pattern of life first emerged from studying what was happening to animals and plants between the tides.”

–Adam Nicolson, Life Between the Tides

Intertidal life inspired Russian zoologist Elie Metchnikoff’s earliest theories in immunology, setting the stage for our modern understanding of inflammation and disease.  More than a century onwards, we know that the sea is also immensely therapeutic, helping us to cultivate a lifestyle that manages inflammation…