There is so much going on under the surface of the sea! All the life that is here feeds on it. I am confined to being a surface dweller, to look at this world from a spit of rock. How I wish I could build my home not in the air but in the water, to look at the birds and the animals come down from the ceiling of the water surface, to see the world of the plankton and the fish from their own home, to live among the prey... in a little crooked house with a mussel garden and anenomes growing on the windowsill.
The surface feeds on the sea. Essentially, none of the seabirds or animals I live among are prey, except for the odd simian with a knife and a stick. (Okay, the raven takes a gull chick or two and the gulls do eat the placentae of the sealions... is that even considered "predation"?) In the sea, it appears, everything is eating and being eaten. How do the fish live? Do they flush out of burrows like birds? Do they flock? Do their eat their own young? Which ones migrate? Where do the go? What I'd givet to see the spectacle of a puffin or a cormorant or a kaira plunging through the surface! What is it like to live with the furry and feathered, toothed and beaked death that drops without warning through the surface, from outer space?
The ecology of the island is not tangled. No, that is never a fair thing to say. There are flowering plants, beetles, bees, ants, hopping mini-shrimp creatures. There are the wagtails and sparrows that eat them. There are lichens and little twisted trees in the alpine tundra of the top of the island that live on lord knows what. But the land could never support the animal masses that teem along the edges, these cliff bound metropolises.
I don't feel that the direct interactions between the sea-bound species are very imtimate. If all the gloopishes dissapepared, would the moyevka mind? Would the sealion sleep any less soundly? I doubt it, (though for that matter, the continuous stream of poo must be a bounty for the plankton).
This island is not a tree that grows in it's own soil so much as it is a tent that is staked to the sea, and everything that happens on it depends on the whimsy of the sea.