The Lake Erie snow machine keeps pumping in the white stuff. You can barely tell I cleared the driveway yesterday. But I've vowed not to complain. I heard this morning they have 29 inches on the ground in Chagrin Falls, so the 6 or 8 inches we have is nothing to complain about. Could be a lot worse. God only knows what it's like in Chardon or Ashtabula.
I've just started reading Edwin Way Teale's third book on the seasons, Autumn Across America, and once again I am amazed at how astute the guy was. His observations aren't necessarily huge startling discoveries, but they are wonderful little insights into how the world works and sometimes why.
In one of the early chapters Teale puts on swim fins and mask and takes us under the shallow waters of Shinnecock Bay on Long Island to look at eelgrass. Sort of an odd choice of habitat to observe in a book about fall, but there's a method to his seeming madness, for he's interested not just in slimy seaweed, but the web of life that's connected to this seemingly unimportant plant.
Teale tells how a mysterious catastrophe brought death to the eelgrass on both sides of the Atlantic and altered life both in the water and on the shore.
In late 1930 eelgrass began dying off along the Atlantic coast. By the summer of 1931 it was dying all the way from North Carolina to Cape Cod. The following year the mysterious epidemic spread north to Canada and also devastated eelgrass beds in England, Holland and France. By 1933 less than one percent of the eelgrass along the east coast, from Labrador to Beaufort, North Carolina, was still alive.
The first casualty was the brant, whose diet once consisted almost exclusively of eelgrass. When 90% of their food disappeared, so nearly did the brant. Their numbers shrank so alarmingly the government declared a year-round closed season along the eastern seaboard.
Next came the scallops, which live largely in eelgrass beds. When they disappeared, so did a lot of the shellfish industry. Then came companies that used eelgrass for soundproofing and furniture stuffing: they went out of business because their raw material was no longer available.
The list goes on and on, but the point is the same: a seemingly mundane plant that most of us at the beach would see as more bane than boon was a key link in the chain of life. When it died off, the repercussions were felt far from the shallow bays of our eastern seaboard.
But not all of Teale's observations are so earth-shattering. The four pages he devotes to the simple scallop are just fun. Did you know scallops have eyes? Came as a shock to me, too. Do you know they can swim through the water backwards and forwards like a jet propelled flying saucer? I assumed they sat on the bottom like other clams, relatively inert. Hardly. They've even been observed migrating in great hordes when they're young.
I don't know about you, but I love picking up these little nuggets of knowledge. Do they change my life? Probably not, but I think if you have any curiosity about the world around you it's just fun to know these sorts of things.
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