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	Podcast:		A Cape Cod Notebook from WCAI
	Episode:		Walking the High Tide Line and Asking, "Why?"
	Category:		Government & Organizations
	Duration:		00:03:57
	Publish Date:		2019-01-22 06:26:08
	Description:		Today I want to talk a bit about the “wrack line,” that more or less continuous line of debris left on the beach by the previous high tide. The content of the wrack line can be meager and ordinary – just a few bits of seaweed – or overwhelming and dramatic, like the 40-foot carcass of a dead humpback whale that washed up at Newcomb Hollow several years ago. But if we only investigate the content of the wrack line, big or small, I think we miss the bigger question. We tend to ask what is this, but not why this now? For me the deepest and most persistent mystery of the wrack line is why the sea throws up certain items – kelp, sea clams, crabs - on one tide, and completely different one – seaweed, mussels, starfish - on the next? For instance, one day in early January, after a hard one-night blow, I found in the wrack line a specimen of a ten-armed star fish. It was purplish on top, white on the bottom, with short, curled arms. My Peterson guide told me it was a Smooth Sun Star – Solaster
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