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Bio-geographic and geo-morphologic horizontal zonation down the slope of the mountain facing the sea. We have a relatively verdant segment on the upper portions of the flank, then a completely sterile zone of tight sand, small stones and light brown rubble, followed then by an overtly rocky portion, and then finally the soft, loose seashore sands down below.
Yarada Beach, March,1, 2020.
March 1, 2020. Yarada Beach, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. For pertinent comments please see the next series of photos below.
March 1, 2020. Yarada Beach,Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.
The bottom of a dry lake-bed is known to contract and crack as it dries in the summer heat, it contracting and cracking into hexagons or pentagons - polygons in general.The same is not true of this sheet of flat rock on the slanting face of a hill exposed to the full blast of the sun’s heat, where alternate expansion and contraction between night and day probably accounts for those beautifully regular geometric fissures, which, unlike the lake-bed, crack not into polygons but into an array of regular rectangles, of such precise geometry that it seems almost as though they had been incised by a human hand, they resembling the craquelure seen on old Renaissance paintings, enhancing the stark, sterile beauty of this listless, light-lacerated landscape.
It was unclear whether these were eagles or hawks; but given that the latter generally outnumber the former, they were likely hawks. Note the little bird, completely black - possibly Dicrurus macrocercus, the Black Drongo - sitting right next to the duo on the barbed wire fence, utterly unmolested by them despite its diminutive size, peaceful co-existence apparently possible even between predatory and non-predatory avian species.
These hawks were by no means always still and stationary but would frequently circle in lazy loops on the thermal air currents rising up the face of the adjacent mountain baking in the blazing, burning heat of early summer.
March 1, 2020, Yarada Beach, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.
One of the great discoveries in photobiology is the fact that red algae (Rhodophyta) can exist at the great depths they do because of the accessory pigment - phycoerythrin - they possess that allows them to harvest the faint blue light - of around wavelength 475 nm - reaching these great depths. The absorption maxima of phycoerythrin lie at 498nm and 565 nm, the former wavelength relatively abundant at depths greater than a hundred and fifteen feet but the latter wavelength virtually absent for it falls into the green region of the spectrum.
Indeed at deep depths all that exists is a pervasive blue. 498 nm light, that lies at the border separating blue light from green light - which latter starts at 500 nm - is, as mentioned, present at depth. Phycoerythrin can and does absorb at 475 nm but with only about 40% efficiency, something that regular Chlorophyll a - also present in red algae - which absorbs at 435 nm cannot do at all, but which Chlorophyll b can!!, but which the red algae do not possess!!.
Why did not the red algae then opt for Chlorophyll b which is better at absorbing around 475 nm? One can think of two reasons. The blue absorption peak of Chlorophyll b is too sharp and narrow, making it inefficient at harvesting the other blue wavelengths present at these great depths, while phycoerythrin has a far more flat and broad absorption band in the blue wavelengths - that lie between 420 and 500 nm - allowing it to harvest a broader range of blue wavelengths..
Secondly, herbivory by fishes would be disastrous for the red algae, for energy resources are poor at these depths and the algae would not be able to recover from such depredation. Red colour is camouflage gear for at such depths it appears black in colour, a strategy the fish living at these depths also employ, for many of them are red in colour.
What is truly fascinating is that while there ARE blue wavelengths around 435 nm that DO reach such depths, the Chlorophyll a present in red algae - and designed to capture precisely this wavelength - seems to be unable to harvest it!! - see the beautiful paper on the photosynthetic action spectrum of marine algae by F.T.Haxo - the reaction center dependent entirely on the light energy “fed” to it by the phycoerythrin in order to conduct photosynthesis!!. Clearly in the red algae the Chlorophyll a has become a vestigial structure!!, similar to our vestigial appendix - useful in rabbits but not in us!!!
In the photo above we have a specimen of a green alga, a red alga and a red alga that has been bleached white by the Sun.
Yarada Beach, Andhra Pradesh, March 1, 2020.
The seashores of the middle and lower sections of the western ghats of India while certainly luxuriantly green and very beautiful are too lush for them to be in the realm of the lean, laconic lofty. Here on the Eastern Seaboard of India, and specifically Andhra Pradesh, Nature is nowhere near as green, thick, dense and rich in verdant vegetation as its antipode on the other side. Indeed here a listlessness and sterility mark the shoreline. But this sterility is also a stark stupendousness that routinely takes on the proportions of abstract art, as readily seen in the above photos - to the point where one can take these photos as is, frame them as abstract Art, to then be sold in an Art Gallery !!.
Yarada Beach, March 1, 2020. Andhra Pradesh.
What the water hyacinth is to freshwater bodies, Ipomoea-pes-caprae is to the seashore, a spectacularly successful species that literally carpets, in gushing green, the shorelines of Andhra Pradesh; this despite the hyper-saline environment, the deadening desiccation and the burning sand into which it plunges its roots, both species capable of overcoming the inclement elements with almost anti- climactic ease.
While the water hyacinth is not particularly pretty and pleasant of sight, marring as it does the beauty of inland lacustrine waters and rivers, the same cannot be said of the Goat’s Foot - the alias of Ipomoea - that redeems itself by the sheer lavender beauty of its flowers,the trumpet-shaped inflorescence trumpeting, as it were, the evolutionary success of the sprawling species that literally stitches the loose sands together with its underground roots preventing the denudation of the dune sands.
The pale green leaves are surprisingly fat and fleshy - not the paper-thin paper towels that are the leaves of inland species!! - and have an indentation at their apices on the mid-line, dividing the leaf into twin lobes that resembles a cloven hoof -hence the alias.
Note the upward pointing habitus of the leaves, this presumably to shield them from the hot heat of the burning sands. What is truly remarkable is that the physiologic function of both the indentation and the fleshiness remain unexplained.The former might be to break the wind force and prevent the leaf from being bent over and onto the burning sands - the charred curled black remains of the dead leaves in the photos are dramatic testimony that leaves here are”burnt” long before they have a chance to decay.
The fleshy character of the leaf might be to prevent desiccation much as desert species of plant too are fleshy for the same reason. Cacti are found on the seashores here for a reason - the littoral is a desert despite the adjacent massive moving mass of marine water.
Yarada beach, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, March 1, 2020.
Yarada Beach, March 1, 2020. Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. In a delicate filigree of stark pure white, the dead branches of a dead tree form a trellis over the yonder ocean of Yarada, in a gnarled tableau of remarkable pulchritude and purity - it an incredible, albeit inadvertent, architecture of abstract ataractic art. For more pertinent comments please see the caption below the next series of photographs.
