Rougher Waters Threaten Blue Mussel

April 11 -- Do you think you could hang onto the wing of an airplane while it zipped across the sky at 600 miles per hour?

Not a chance, yet that's equivalent to what all sorts of marine creatures do, day in and day out, in the intertidal zone where the sea meets the shore.

"It's a very physically stressful environment," says Emily Carrington, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island, who admits to somewhat of an obsession with the critters that inhabit one of Earth's most difficult regions. She believes they may be able to tell us much about what the future holds.

"They get bashed by waves, with water velocities of 20 meters per second," she says. "And when the tide goes out, they can get fried to a crisp, or heated up, dried out, or frozen. This is all a typical day in the intertidal zone.

"It's really a tough place to make a living."

But it's hardly a dead zone.

Key Species

"The weird thing is it's one of the most diverse habitats that we know," Carrington says. "There's more diversity in terms of species and body design" than almost anyplace else, and they even look different.

"It's not that they're all flat, or all round," she says.

All that could be changing, right before our eyes, at a pace so slow and in an environment so tumultuous that it's almost impossible to see it. A growing number of scientists believe the planet is getting warmer, and the climate is being influenced more and more by such events as El Nino, the warming of the Pacific Ocean that causes huge breakers to pry the sand out from under homes along the California coast.

While she was working on her doctorate degree at Stanford University a few years ago, Carrington became fascinated with one particular species that lives in the intertidal zone — the blue mussel. Using nothing but tiny threads, or as Carrington puts it, "nature's little bungee chords," these creatures can hang onto rocks that are being battered by waves driven by hurricanes and violent storms.