fishing and other extraction since the 1930s, so the species found there
would be essentially unaffected by human tastes.
“For about five years it had become very obvious to me that some
very dramatic changes had taken place and were continuing to take
place in the intertidal off Hopkins,” Baxter says. That was the source of
his challenge to the students who came for the undergraduate research
course each year. What had changed? How much had it changed? What
factors were associated with those changes? And, did the changes in
snails and the seaweed simply represent a shift in a few individual
species, or was something broader and more significant happening?
For years, the students were not interested. Like the other
researchers at Hopkins, they favored quick, experimental science—the
molecular or neurobiology—over tediously counting critters in a tide-
pool. Most looked at Baxter’s suggestion as research unlikely to yield
spectacular findings.
It was not until Baxter’s last semester as a full-time member of the
Hopkins faculty that he got a bite: Rafe Sagarin and Sarah Gilman.
They started with a study done in the 1930s by a Stanford Ph.D.
candidate named Willis Hewatt, who had pounded heavy-duty brass
bolts into the slow-eroding granite and meticulously counted every
anemone, whelk, snail, sea star, barnacle, limpet, and other critter
along the 108 yards in between.
The area where Hewatt did his work is a little triangle of pools
made up of huge granite rock and ending at a bouldered point,
streaked with white from the seabirds it hosts. The outer rocks provide
some shelter from the more turbulent—and cold—waters of Monterey
Bay, about 100 yards from shore. It is a perfect spot for looking at the
creatures that thrive in the intertidal zone, the band along the rocks
that is submerged at high tide, exposed at low tide, and wet by spray
and waves in between. In the same way zones of life change as you
climb a mountain—or as you drive north or south along a coastline—
marine life varies by how often it is exposed to air and scalding sun, or
how deeply it is covered by water.
The first problem Gilman and Sagarin encountered was finding
which way Hewatt’s line ran. The location of the first bolt was obvious,
but finding the second proved difficult. When they finally did find it, the
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