If you pay attention, everything you find in nature has a story to tell. My favourite natural storybook is the city seashore, because the sea is the world’s greatest stage! By Sahir Doshi.
On Mumbai’s Juhu Beach, trash may turn out to be treasure – with tentacles! One sunny April morning, I stumbled upon a puddle. What appeared as floating bits of blue plastic were colonies of porpita, a jellyfish-like animal whose arrival tells those in the know a story about the sea. Porpita colonies live far out in the ocean. Drifting with the waves, they end up on the beach only when there are really strong winds or cyclones. We usually see them right before the rains, and, sure enough, April this year saw an early pre-monsoon thunderstorm in Mumbai!
A mermaid’s purse is nature’s tiny underwater cradle. Photo: Kyle Hartshorn/CC-BY-2.0.
If you pay enough attention, everything you find in nature has a story to tell. My favourite natural storybook is the city seashore. Because the sea is the world’s greatest stage! It covers 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and is home to some of the most amazing and mysterious animals. Its powerful waves can bring signs and souvenirs from the distant deep right to our shoreline, such as the porpita, which lives far out at sea, but washed onto Juhu Beach during the storm.
Take the mermaid’s purse, an odd little accessory that is the egg case of a shark! Find one on a beach and it might tell you that a newborn shark is swimming offshore. Then there are the strange white miniature surfboards that some people call ‘crocodile’s tears’ – these are the internal bones of dead cuttlefish. And those flipper tracks on the sand? That might indicate that a mother sea turtle came ashore the night before to lay her eggs!
A porpita swims in an ocean of trash. Photo: Sarang Naik.
All these treasures tell stories, but so does the trash around them. Your detective skills come to the fore here. Some of the trash is litter that careless people leave on the beach, such as cans, food packets, and water bottles. There’s other stuff that people don’t bring to the beach such as old clothes, shoes, toys, and household items that tell a sadder story. They are clues to the waste we toss into garbage dumps and gutters, far from the beach, only to be carried by rain into the sea – and washed back onto our shores!
Explore the wild places in your city, and you can see two stories play out at the same time. One is of all the amazing wildlife and nature that survives amongst us. The other is a record of the impact our actions have on that same environment. From the first story, we can understand the beautifully wild world we live in. And from the second, we can learn how to better protect it.
Sahir Doshi is a wildlife content creator, nature educator, rapper, and a past Kids for Tigers ambassador. He explores the Mumbai city shorelines in search of cool finds.
