Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts

Chapter 2. “Zoological Introduction” to Between Pacific Tides

Ricketts revised the original draft of Between Pacific Tides throughout the early 1930s, resubmitting it to Stanford University Press in 1936. To this draft he appended his four-page “Zoological Introduction,” in which he defended the book’s ecological arrangement as “a natural history in every sense of the word.” In this introduction, he notes that arranging Between Pacific Tides according to shore habitats “necessitated a great amount of field work, most of which could have been obviated if the traditional treatment had been used.” But he was committed to the book’s form and to an ecological method and perspective focused on the intricate relationships found in intertidal community systems. For much of his career, Ricketts struggled to find a place for his views in scientific circles that dismissed the potential and far-reaching implications of such progressive, nontraditional thinking. Despite the establishment of academic thinking against which he worked, Between Pacific Tides is Ricketts’s most recognized scientific achievement. In print for over sixty-five years and now in its fifth edition, the book is revered as a classic and pioneering text in marine biology. Today, handbooks organized by habitat are abundant, and modern marine biology has, in fact, adopted Ricketts’s early and then-unpopular views. His “Zoological Introduction ” is a defense not only of Between Pacific Tides but also of an entire legacy of ecological texts following his groundbreaking example. • • • • • • • • • chapter 2 “Zoological Introduction” to Between Pacific Tides 84 Revising again this laborious and long-continued work, now after more than three years, the writers realize more keenly than ever how great a task has been undertaken. The ecological arrangement (in part after Verrill and Smith’s pioneering 1872 report—a natural history in every sense of the word) has entailed not only considerable clerical difficulty but has necessitated a great amount of field work, most of which could have been obviated if the traditional treatment had been used. Probably the zoologist familiar with Pacific invertebrates will find this account less accessible as a manual and reference, possibly even more cumbersome and inexact, than if we had built it according to the usual scheme. The tyro, however, and the armchair general reader will find it surely more convenient and a lot more interesting. Advantages to classes in marine biology and to the visiting zoologist will be apparent also. And the professional worker can realize, extenuatingly, that inexactness and inconsistency are the prerogatives also (and more particularly ) of the animals themselves—as though they were conspiring against one’s attempt to catalog them neatly! ([This is] the reality of natural things as contrasted with our intellectual need for realizing all phenomena in discrete states.) The attempt throughout has been to construct an account interesting to the lay reader and useful alike to the zoologist. Probably we shall have succeeded only partially in traveling that knife edge without leaning on the one side toward technicalities, which must bewilder the layman , or on the other toward inaneness, to which in popular writings the biologist will be sensitive. Since its first draft several years back, the manuscript has been used in actual practice up and down the coast. Some of its deficiencies have been corrected. Some are just now being realized. Others probably we have not even yet discovered. But in the meantime, ecological accounts published elsewhere have lent validity to some of the key ideas. In this work, the distribution of Pacific littoral invertebrates within a given region is seen in the light of competition and interrelation between the animals themselves and the limiting aspects of the following factors: (a) wave shock, (b) tidal level, [and] (c) type of bottom, along with a good many others of lesser importance, such as temperature, stagnation, silting , etc., all pretty well intermingled and interdependent. Occasionally distribution can be indexed by some of the lesser factors, salinity ([as in] Puget Sound barnacles), insolation (protection from or exposure to sun, as in British limpets), etc. But there are hundreds—probably the majority of our seashore animals—whose primary factor is almost surely Between Pacific Tides 85 referable to one of the above fundamentals or to an integration of all three. These important three mold the environment and thereby influence the communities, which in turn act on each other. Interrelation seems to be pretty much the keynote of modern holistic concepts, wherein the whole consists of the animal or the community in its...