And Sea Forager is the culmination of sort of my crazy misspent life walking the intertidal zone of this area. The intertidal zone is a fancy term for that area between high tide and low tide. That's kind of my zone.
These guys live in the Gulf of Mexico on the rocky shore. They inhabit kind of shallow intertidal pools. And what these guys do is when the tide is high, they will swim around-- they're only little fish, probably about yea big--
That's kind of my zone. There's a famous book about the intertidal zone of California called "Between Pacific Tides." Raise your hand if you've heard of this book? Oh great, that's excellent.
And they wrote a little book called "The Log Book of the Sea of Cortez," which is a wonderful sort of travelogue of their experiences in the intertidal zone, that area between high tide and low tide, along the California coast all the way down to Baja. And it's kind of a cool place.
And that biologist is named Bob Paine in the University of Washington. And he was studying the intertidal zones along the Pacific coast. And he found that this starfish, this apex predator starfish, was a keystone species in the community along the intertidal .
Many of you may know this already, but I'm just going to backtrack a little bit. And Sea Forager is the culmination of sort of my crazy misspent life walking the intertidal zone of this area. The intertidal zone is a fancy term for that area between high tide and low tide.
You can count on getting food from someone else. Like if you're a muscle or a sea urchin or something that lives in a highly variable coastal intertidal , what do you do?
I didn't actually mean to do this, but why not? That book, "Between Pacific Tides," sort of made the California intertidal zone, put it on the map, so to speak. It's sort of a tome of marine biology.
or all vertebrate geeks know about this book." And I just assumed that Leighton would not know this book because he's not an outdoorsman kind of guy. He's more of just a brilliantly talented artist, but I don't think of him as a person who forages in the intertidal zone. So I didn't think he would know about "Between Pacific Tides." And I said, "Well, the name of the book is 'Between Pacific
And he was studying the intertidal zones along the Pacific coast. And he found that this starfish, this apex predator starfish, was a keystone species in the community along the intertidal . Because much like the keystone in a Roman arch, if you removed it-- which he did-- the community collapses.