The Sea Is Not Made of Water, by Adam Nicolson

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Pools win

LUCY LETHBRIDGE The Sea Is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides By Adam Nicolson William Collins £20

The great Victorian naturalist Philip Gosse is remembered in Adam Nicolson’s new book not for being the unbending religious fundamentalist of his son Edmund’s memoir, but as the godfather of rockpool wonderment.

These shoreline cups, nourished by the in and out of the tides, are teeming miniature theatres of life. ‘Never more great than when minutely great’, Gosse said of the tiny glories of the rockpool.

In The Sea Is Not Made of Water, Nicolson describes how he created three pools near his Scottish home, Ardtornish.

He then lets the contemplation of these ‘micro-Arcadias’ take him on fascinating voyages through history, science, philosophy and literature. Over the course of several summers, he finds hosts of inhabitants in his pools, including winkles, whelks, sea urchins, starfish – and, in one, ten different kinds of seaweed.

There is nothing that can’t be illuminated by the examination of life at its tiniest, of the ‘flitter and skitter’ of flux and flow. Nicolson finds in his pools ‘the cupping of reality in several layers of itself’. It is an experience akin to gazing into fractals with their dizzyingly infinite spirals: ‘The closer you look, the deeper it dives.’

Nicolson quotes from William Golding’s review of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water: ‘We stand among the flotsam, the odd shoes and tins, hotwater bottles and skulls of sheep or deer. We know nothing. We look daily at the mystery of plain stuff. We stand where any upright food-gatherer has stood, on the edge of our own consciousness.’

Take the sandhoppers, those glossy little amphipods to be found on beaches all over Britain. We learn that they have sophisticated grooming rituals for keeping grit from their shiny carapace, and complicated social systems, and, most fascinating of all, that they have inner compasses that guide them across their territories, as they navigate by sun and moon.

Could prawns be considered conscious? wonders Nicolson. Their meaty tail which makes them so delicious is actually a giant muscle which enables the prawn to flip out of danger at a sudden movement. But what are they thinking, if they are thinking? Scientists, we learn, have found that crayfish, similarly equipped, are sometimes flippers and sometimes freezers – and the circumstances they are in make no difference to their reactions.

Then there is the ruthless, survivalist efficiency of crabs. In one of Nicolson’s rockpools, there is a stand-off between a colony of small, green crabs and an old matriarchal mussel attached to the side. She is too old for the crabs to eat but they gobble her tiny offspring – and she eats theirs.

Crab copulation takes place over two or three days – it can happen only when the female has moulted and her new shell is soft. Sometimes the male, seeing she is almost ready, will embrace a female in his pincers and hold her there for several days to keep her safe and out of range of the competition.

Female crabs, like most rockpool crustaceans, lay millions of eggs over their lifetime, releasing their larvae into the deepest swell of the sea – because that is the safest place for them until they are ready to float inland on the tide and into a brimming rockpool of their own.

Nicolson writes beautifully of how the tiniest organisms carry within them a cosmic echo. Everything is bound to