Intertidal impact

It’s unusual to be a person who notices; who, to borrow from Mary Oliver, pays attention and is astonished by the natural world. And on Mumbai’s coast, where the cityscape teeters towards the Arabian Sea, the natural world risks being drowned out in our consciousness as life clamours across India’s most populous city. But Sarang Naik is a photographer who sees what gets overlooked on his home city’s shores.

‘I have lived in Mumbai my whole life,’ he begins, ‘but had never thought of the city’s beaches as rich in wildlife.’ The zoology-graduate-turned-photographer has come to know the coastal belt in all its colour, complexity and caprices. Sarang has spent the better part of a decade learning the language of wilderness on his doorstep, and in one of the most unlikely places on earth he has learnt something powerful: ‘Wildlife is everywhere!’ His photojournalism underscores his hope for this planet. ‘Don’t just think it’s in sanctuaries or national parks. It’s everywhere; you just need to look.’

Sarang has trained his lens on the intertidal zone, the strip of shore between the tides. Plants and animals here are some of the toughest on our planet, adapted to a world that is part submarine, part terrestrial. Citizens of the low shore risk pounding waves and competition for real estate and resources; those higher up are beaten by blazing sun and can lose up to 70% of their body water through evaporation (we humans expire if we lose 15% of ours). It’s a natural laboratory to excite the most eager scientist. And a world where the ocean’s whimsy and wonder are readily exposed for happy beachcombers.

But there is something more essential to this place: it’s our first step from land back into the sea. Coastlines have grown our brains and shaped us as modern human beings. The sea retreats at every low tide to bare its bounty, only to reclaim the shore in a celestial rhythm that we have communed with for hundreds of thousands of years. And while not everyone has a boat, can dive or owns a rod and reel to cast, almost everyone can access the span of shore that opens between the land and the sea.

Its very egalitarianism makes it a place under pressure for the longest time and from both land- and sea-based threats. The intertidal zone is harvested, developed, dredged and polluted. With our changing climate, it risks rising sea levels and fluctuating ocean chemistry. But what worries Sarang most is that it is overlooked and underestimated.

‘Mumbai’s coastline is synonymous with pollution. The first thing that comes to mind is a coast overcrowded with people, with filth spewing into the sea,’ he says soberly. ‘What people don’t realise is just how much wildlife persists here.’

More than 500 marine species have been recorded on the Greater Mumbai coastline, where a city hums along the length of rocky, sandy and mixed beaches. On the diverse rocky shores, crescent-banded grunter swim in tidal pools that house common octopus, moray eels and beaked sea snakes. The rocks are crusted with barnacles, oysters and limpets; there are sea stars and sea snails, seaweeds and algae, shrimps and sea slugs. On sandy beaches, burrowing worms lead subterranean lives, while windowpane oysters and textile clams are scattered among button shells and blood cockles.

‘Marine Life of Mumbai was started in 2017 by marine biologists, photographers and concerned citizens who had realised that the city’s shores also harboured wildlife that needed to be documented,’ explains Sarang. ‘That was the catalyst to my career in marine wildlife photography. Exploring with this group opened my eyes to Mumbai’s incredible blue biodiversity and I decided I had to start documenting it in a way that opens other people’s eyes too.’

In Sarang’s Mumbai, flamingos crowd the coast in their statuesque hordes. Their colourful abundance is only made more extraordinary set against the arboretum of apartments that obliterates the sky. A tiny Bombay dorid sends a lurid warning to other tidal-pool dwellers that is as neon as the lights that electrify the skyline. And the sleepless secrets of millions of Mumbai’s residents are reflected in the nocturnal glow of a pool of violet zoanthids; there are just as many nocturnal dramas afoot on these reefscapes.

Wide-angled and macro shots wrest wildlife from obscurity to how they appear in Sarang’s mind: fascinating and worthy of our respect. ‘My photographs intentionally make these animals and plants the focus, offset by the cityscape behind. Over the years, I avoided the stereotypical narrative of toxic decay. These animals live here; we must pay attention.’

But people live here too; all 23-odd million of them in the world’s fourth most populous city. With nearly 73,000 people crammed into just under every 200 square kilometres (73 square miles) of Mumbai, the pressure on marine resources is enormous. ‘It’s fascinating to observe that the more polluted the shore, the more densely populated with wildlife it has sometimes become. Those animals that could adapt have done so. There are certain coral species, for instance, that we find only in waters with high sewage content,’ says Sarang.And the people who harvest in the intertidal zone endure, despite the obvious health risks. ‘They say that they have been doing it for generations,’ he explains.

‘This is another issue that no one is looking at. All along the city’s coast people collect bivalves, intertidal animals that are known to accumulate heavy metals. Harvesters have told me that when they boil the bivalves at home, the entire place smells of oil.’

Sarang’s work now incorporates more of the pollution. The intertidal zone is a meeting place – of sea and land, of high and low tide. Hemmed in as houses and harvesters approach from the shore and as pollution and fishing encroach from the sea, it’s where the toughest survive. But Sarang still nudges us towards nature as the lead character: a beaked sea snake strewn among the tide’s discards; the natural meeting the unnatural as Portuguese men o’ war, which typically beach en masse along the coast in monsoon season, wash ashore tangled in tar balls and plastic. As much as we engulf, consume and appropriate, nature persists.

‘In Mumbai, I know where to go and what to look for. So I find that seeking life in the intertidal zone here, unlikely though it would seem to most, is relatively easier than what I would have to learn to do elsewhere.’

The crush of the city that Sarang left behind for his first international assignment – and first overseas trip – has given way to milkwood trees clustering above beaches where cattle occasionally wander and traditional rondavels dot the hillsides. In the lush hills between the Mtata and Mtamvuna rivers in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province lies Mdumbi, a village on the Transkei coast that is home to the amaMpondo people. Echoes of the issues that plague his home shores surfaced at nearby Coffee Bay (‘there was some tourism-related pollution’) and further afield in the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town (‘there were headlines about sewage outfalls and pervasive plastic pollution’) but, he says,

‘When you’re coming from Mumbai, everything looks pristine to me – and Mdumbi really looked unspoiled.’

The ability to see the natural world despite the intensity of Mumbai is perhaps only possible because Sarang has a reverence that disciplines how he frames what he finds. And patience and reverence are what are needed to document the Wild Coast – the informal name for the coastline that extends from the Great Kei River to the Umtamvuna River. It is aptly named; shipwrecks litter the sea floor, leaving ghostly traces in place names and in some of the people who now inhabit the coast. The sea heaves during storms, its powerful currents plaguing marine researchers who try to record the subtidal life offshore. Any familiarity with the life on its rocky shores requires years of study – or generations of communion by the people who have lived on this coast for hundreds of years.

Limpets, barnacles and mussels all cling to these wave-battered rocks. People harvest shellfish, bait, seaweed and shells from the coast, with distinct patterns in who collects and when harvesting happens. Here, Sarang stumbled on links to this more rural, coastal community he’d not previously understood. He recounts the relationship between the fishers of Mdumbi and its rocky coast: ‘The women and young children go to the shore at low tide, harvesting limpets by plucking them from the rocks with a tool. They string a long collection of limpets onto the end of a line and then the men go out late at night to catch crayfish.’

Sarang was kept at arm’s length (not just by spring tides, safety concerns and a dearth of natural history information) because the fishers forbid lights on the shore – no disturbance permitted, the crayfish are skittish. And, knowing that there are many and varied, and ancient, ways that people commune with the coast, he complied. It’s what he does best: witness, study, understand – all to relate more intimately with the intertidal. There are familiar echoes here of the years he has spent memorising the patterns of tides and seasons; the lore, the routines of people who witness wildlife on their ancestral coasts are all a lesson in paying attention.

Sarang’s sights aren’t set solely on the intertidal any more. ‘I honestly feel quite overwhelmed when I look at the state of things, sometimes. But then I think that there are many of us realising that we must do what we can. And we must build community. We can do something locally, together. Whenever I join a research group or any other active group of citizens, it gives me so much hope – and that is powerful. You focus on what you can do.’

It’s not surprising that a photographer whose eye was drawn to the intertidal, where animals and plants live in community, seeks the same for himself. If the tides have taught Sarang anything, it’s that conservation will always be this push-and-pull, but his approach reminds us that our hope – and our futures – will depend on how we build communities ourselves.