“I came down here and I had a naïve view of marine science,” he
says. At twenty, he had thought the discipline consisted of learning
about the animals that inhabit the different niches along the salt-water
edges. But at Hopkins he found that most people were molecular biol-
ogists or neurobiologists, considering the marine species on a tiny,
chemical scale. Sagarin says he did not understand what most of the
faculty were talking about when they discussed the minutiae of their
work.
One of the faculty members that spring was Chuck Baxter, a
marine ecologist who had worked from the Hopkins station since the
1970s. Deep-voiced and white-bearded, Baxter looks like a silver-haired
William Shakespeare with a dash of Ernest Hemingway thrown into
the mix. The professor’s seniority and drive made him a central figure
in such projects as helping found the now-famous Monterey Bay
Aquarium and developing a major film documentary to bring the com-
plex lives of snails and clams to a public that sees them mainly on din-
ner plates.
Pulling no punches, Baxter offered the students the same chal-
lenge he had offered their predecessors for 5 years. He wanted to know
“why there were so many damned serpulorbus”—a prevalent tube snail
from southern California—in the Monterey area, Sagarin recalls. The
tube snail covered everything down south, but until a few years earlier
had been nearly impossible to find from Hopkins north.
Baxter knew the tube snails from the 1950s, when he was an
undergraduate at UCLA and later as a graduate student living in Santa
Monica. Serpulorbuscovered every surface, from rocks to docks, that
were splashed by Pacific waves.
Like most such animals, larval serpulorbusfloat through the water,
eventually landing on and cementing themselves to rocks or other sur-
faces that are intermittently inundated by the tides. Once settled into
place, they begin growing long, tubular shells, looking rather like the
extended blur you see when something runs in slow motion. As the ser-
pulorbus population grows, the overlapping tubes completely cover
almost any surface that will stand still long enough, like calcified
kudzu. The reefs they form help other species move into areas where
they would otherwise have no toe hold. Sea urchins, for example, can-
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