At the bottom of the cliff, a two-minute walk from the high tide line, there is a small stone-built mortuary, constructed in 1881 and formerly the temporary resting place for the bodies of shipwrecked sailors washed up on the sands.
Today, by morbid coincidence, the strandline was littered with dead man’s fingers, Alcyonium digitatum. These soft corals live in deep water and are usually only seen by divers, but late winter storms had cast some ashore amid heaps of kelp.
In life, these corals are exquisite organisms, covered in the feeding tentacles of the polyps they support; in death, they resemble flesh of swollen fingers and pudgy fists after long immersion in seawater.
Among them we found the corpse of a lumpsucker (Cyclopterus lumpus), perhaps the ugliest but most endearing of the fish that breed just beyond the extreme low water mark. Its blue-grey skin, marked with bony ridges, was leathery to the touch, and its most curious feature, pelvic fins modified to form a powerful sucker that allows it to cling to rocks, was clearly visible.
Lumpsuckers come inshore to lay their eggs in early spring. This individual’s arrival had been unfortunately timed, coinciding with the worst storm of the year. Torn from the rocks by mountainous seas and surging currents, it had been left stranded in the seaweed.
The females lay their pale yellow eggs on the lower shore, then return to the relative safety of deep water, but males attach themselves to a rock and show remarkable parental devotion, guarding the spawn from predators and using their fins to fan it with oxygenated water.
A large common starfish was the sole survivor among these casualties, crawling in the wet sand but not fast enough to keep pace with the falling tide. It too might have been caught out while spawning in shallow water, producing larvae to join the spring plankton.
I picked it up and felt its arms stiffen as it flexed its muscles, drawing together the calcareous plates that lie just below the skin. It would soon have attracted the attention of the gulls that had descended on the dead lumpsucker, but today it was lucky: I hurled it out into the retreating waves.
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