New Documentary Takes Sarika Cullis-Suzuki Back to Childhood Beach
By Sarika Cullis-Suzuki
I was six years old when I first told my mother I was going to be a marine biologist. “And you can be my assistant,” I kindly informed her. We were exploring the intertidal zone — that extraordinary world between high and low tide — on a very special beach: the beach I grew up on.
Fast forward 30 years. I’ve come here to make the documentary Kingdom of the Tide for The Nature of Things. This is a rich intertidal zone and remains one of the most important beaches I’ve ever stepped onto because it taught me an invaluable lesson about the intertidal and the ocean: even when you think you’ve seen it all, rest assured, you haven’t.
Of course, I did become a marine biologist (although my mother, sadly, never became my assistant), and I’ve been very lucky that my work has taken me to remarkable places: from coastal mangrove forests to the high seas, from colourful coral reefs to thick eelgrass beds. Yet this seemingly unassuming beach, in a tiny bay off an island in the Salish Sea, in my home province of British Columbia, remains my all-time favourite.
The number of creatures in this modest bay astounds. It was here I first discovered the delicate porcelain crab with its curiously flat, wide pincer claws that were often missing, likely dropped in an attempt to evade predators (amazingly they can regrow them).
The orange sea cucumber lives under rocks nearby, its bright, flowery tentacles the only part of its body that’s visible. Here, I remember holding a moon snail for the first time, watching transfixed as it pushed all the water out if its huge foot and folded itself, origami-style, back into its shell.
This beach was where I first dug for clams and picked oysters for dinner. I learned later that this bay is a clam garden, built thousands of years ago by first nations who lined bays like this up and down the coast with large rocks, creating ideal clam habitats; I am amazed to this day that the number of clams here remains sky-high.
Limpets adorn the rocks and crevices. When I was young I would gently press them onto my ears to make instant stick-on earrings; they were pretty, but would never stay put! Back to the beach they’d go.
But perhaps the most vivid memory I have of this beach is the first time I witnessed a fish singing. Each year, in late spring, the plain fin midshipman migrates from the depths to flood the intertidal zone from California to Alaska. The alpha males will actually sing for hours to encourage the females to mate with them. Their song is often so loud you can hear it as it resonates out of the ocean and into the air. It is hypnotic.
Yet even though this phenomenon happens all night, every night during every mating season for months at a time up and down the coast, it remains largely unknown. Indeed, I have been exploring this beach every year since I was five, and I only discovered the singing a few years ago. Learning about this creature was so profound, that I devoted my entire PhD to it.
And this is what I love about the intertidal, about the ocean: there is always something new to discover, there is always so much more to explore.
The ocean never ceases to mystify, awe, and humble.
Watch Kingdom of the Tide on The Nature of Things, Friday 7 February at 9pm.
