"We need more seaweed on the beach and more sewage in the water." That's just one of the more startling lines in an interview with Paul Llewellyn, a biologist at the University of Wales, Swansea. And he paints a word-picture of tractors hitting the local beaches. "Fuelled by a distaste for anything smelly, rotting or creepy-crawley, they sweep back and forth across the sands, taking away detritus from the last high tide. By the time the first holidaymakers unpack their towels, swathes of shoreline or high-tide line that should be nurturing dynamic ecosystems, have become sterile no-go areas for wild-life." And the sea itself suffers, from this biologist's point of view.
The water companies, he says "are working so hard to provide pristine bathing water for tourists that marine worms are going hungry and birds are taking off for more nutritious shores." Llewellyn admits to conversion from being a campaigner in the 1980s for cleaning up the beaches. The campaigners have gone too far and "people are now frightened of things like seaweed which they see as dirty and harbouring disease." The key to beach ecosystems is, apparently, the strandline or high-tide mark, where all sorts of flotsam and jetsam wash up.
This repository, as the article puts it, of dead dogs and timber, algae and plastic bottles, used condoms and rusty cans is a dynamic, ephemeral and ever-changing habitat. Unique. Its residents are invertebrates such as flies, beethes, nematodes (wormy things), woodlice and centipedes; feeding on them are oyster-catchers, ringed plovers, crows and finches. This high-tide line is becoming, with its debris, "perhaps our most ignored natural habitat." Fifteen years ago a large part of this beach was designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest because of its bird population. Today, bird numbers are down by more than three-quarters. The ecologist has found virtually none of the small crustaceans such as sand-hoppers, but, where the beach is not cleaned, he found an average of 2,500 in each 25centimetre sampling square, and therefore a thriving bird population.
Reassuringly, a consultant explains that 95 per cent of the Welsh coastline is not cleaned at all. This from a fine article by Fred Pearce in New Scientist for July 25. Moral: don't try to rearrange Nature too much. Or? Y