Endless Blue - Week 24 - All is not Blue Under the Waves

Oceanography

All is not Blue Under the Waves

Contrary to first impressions, terrain under the oceans is not a flat, featureless horizon of silt and sand.  In actuality, submerged land has as varied a morphology as the land above the waves, perhaps more so.  Here, with sea surrounding you in every direction, the currents that affect the formation of terrain consist of water instead of air.

The flow of the currents across the world are subdivided into gyres, large sections of repetitively circulating waters that make up the basis of oceanic climate and provide the impetus for aquatic weather.  As a result of this, the terrain of the Known World is complex, with many different types of habitat overlapping in the same area.

Aquatic Vegetation

Despite being surrounded by the Endless Blue, Elqua's underwater kingdoms are a verdant green.  Great swaths of kelp and seaweed blanket the ocean floor like the timberland and shrubbery of the surface world, with upsweeping and enveloping growths almost re-blanketing the area.  An underwater jungle, with the greens and browns of plant life in all directions, the variety and volume of aquatic plants rivals that of our own -- a rich field of broad leafy vegetation undulating in the ocean current.

It is the kelp forests and seaweed jungles that formed the basis for the nebulous borders of Elquan kingdoms.  Animals cannot exist in the open ocean without becoming easy victims to predators.  They require the dense cover and plentiful food sources the wild areas of aquatic vegetation offer.  To keep this balance intact, the political bodies of water have needed to enforce the concept of "no mer's seas" as buffer zones -- a form of environmental protection.

However, bowing under recent population explosions and exponential consumption needs, piscean cultivation has cleared a significant portion of the wild vegetation in favor of farmland dedicated to acari and ricelqua.  This clearing of sea plants has begun to devastate the natural habitat of ocean life. and for the first time the Known World is looking a little too small for its people, despite being nearly an entire hemisphere of the globe.

Sargasso Seas

Sargasso seas are an evolution of Elqua's kelp forests and seaweed jungles that has adapted into its ecological niche by no longer needing to bury its root system into the soil.  The sargassum's roots eek out nutrients from the water, while the leaves bobbing on the water's surface collect sunlight.  Complete ecosystems can form on larger patches of sargasso, and in many ways become miniature versions of the  mysterious migrating islands.

The godless have turned to the sargassum as possible relief to the increasing needs of the piscean masses, and their culinists have been hard at work trying to develop better hybrids of sea plants that can produce more, faster, and with less stress on the environment.  Unfortunately the unrelenting bias against anything from above the surface of the water, coupled with political fearmongering, has stymied most of the culinists' progress.

Coral Reefs

The great reefs of the Endless Blue are the anchor system for underwater life, providing shelter and food for so many of the indigenous life forms.  What we see as coral is actually a calcium carbonate excretion of the actual coral animal, the polyp, which lives in communities.  Many different kinds of polyps can co-exist in a reef, and each contributes to the beauty and longevity of the habitat.

On Elqua, reefs are much more common that on Earth.  About 10% of the undersea terrain is covered in coral structures, usually (but not exclusively) clustered around intersections of imperceptible lines of energy called ley lines.  These are the areas that Chelon congregate and protect as part of the xanthellae that comprises their civilization.

Oceanic Ridges

These are the hills and mountains of the world, pushing up either through the collision of tectonic plates or by volcanic eruptions depositing new earth from the lava chambers below the crust.  They can reach through all levels of the ocean -- Shelf, Shoal, and Shore -- and even break the surface to form the tiny island chains of Elqua.

Canyon Trenches

The flip side of oceanic ridges are the canyon trenches that line the continental shelves.  These are the deepest parts of the Endless Blue, where the reach of sunlight falters and the cold, looming water saps the warmth from most every living thing.  Ecology here is that of the scavenger, often living off of the sinking bodies of the dead.

A variation of the canyon trench are underground caverns.  Entry to such a cavern can be miles away from the actual cave, and may meander randomly and quixotically, thinning and thickening their width along the raw rocky tunnel walls.

Brine Waterways

The composition of sea water is remarkably saline, but the distribution of that salt is not uniform.  There are places in the oceans where a greater density of salt has made the liquid sink to the bottom and fill in pools, becoming lakes and rivers.  The disparity in diffused material is often so great that you can literally see a difference in the two fluids, the brine possessing an almost oily, greasy-green tint.

These lakes and rivers form waterways just as normal lakes and rivers do on the surface world, with brackish brine flowing generally downward to the lowest depths.  The lower the flow of brinewater, the thicker is becomes from the pressure.

Many piscean culinists use this brinewater as a pereserving agent in food, especially meats.  Brining food draws the water out of the meat, essentially mummifying it so that it spoils at a much more reduced rate.  In conjuction with acari's denaturing acidity, Elquan cuisine is tangy mix of sweet and salty flavors.

Hydrothermal Vents

A hydrothermal vent is a hole in the bottom of the ocean that allows either the water above or underground springs to come in contact with molten rock from the planet's mantle.  This contact immediately flashes the water into steam, which comes billowing as scalding hot water.  They are the closest thing the Known World has to open flame.

While the waters around these fuming vents reaches the boiling point, life still manages to flourish here, in strange forms like tube worms anchored to the sedimentary pillars that form the vent, filtering nutrients from the waters passively.

The Lumulus Basin is renown to be covered in a multitude of these ducts, and it is due to these vents that the Lumulus learned the art of metal-smithing.
Chemical Seeps

Colloquially known as "poison water", chemical seeps are cracks in Elqua's crust that leak chemicals into the oceans.  Substances like methane, sulfur, and hydrocarbons are the most common, but even rarer elements and compounds can be found.  The topography that forms around seep habitats are the most unique in all of Elqua, and are often the sites where surface life re-adapted for underwater life.

Sea Snow

As ludicrous an image as it may seem, it actually does snow under water.  Normally the saline and other trace elements in ocean water prevent the sea from freezing solid, and instead keep the material in a liquid form despite its temperature dropping below its freezing point.  But sometimes the conditions are right for ice crystals to form and be carried by the water currents.
This phenomenon is relegated to the lowest depths of Elqua's oceans, where the gallon after gallon of water pressing downward actually compacts the water into its solid state through sheer force of weight.  At this depth there is little to no light, so consequently not much in the way of heat to melt the newly formed crystals, yet the fluid they are suspended in itself does not freeze.  These particles are then swept up in the ocean currents, whirling, swirling, twirling around in all direction under the grip of flowing water.  More like a flurry than falling snow, these specks can even be seen to "fall" upward as the currents drag them around until they clump together into larger chunks of ice or cling to something they impact during their travels.  Those chunks trapped at lower depths slowly increase in size as they accumulate more crystals, while those free floating ones eventually collect enough mass that buoyancy overcomes inertia and they rise upward, melting in the warmer currents closer to the surface.

Vortices

The technical term for whirlpools, a vortex is a turbulent, spinning funnel on the surface of the water with a downdraft, which may or may not reach down to the sea bed.  The water travels in a spiral pattern towards the center of the whirlpool, and is sucked downward.  They are formed by the complex interplay of Elqua's three moons on the tides of the planet.  Further, vortices have been known to form when sinkholes open up to underground pockets of lesser dense materials, like air pockets.  These are usually the most lethal, as the unfortunate soul trapped at the bottom of such a cavern cannot swim back up the waterfall-like funnel of the whirlpool.

Not all vortexes are manic spirals of circling descent and death.  Indeed, many are quite tranquil drifts, and the more expansive of these vortices are boons to travelers and caravans that can monopolize their currents to speed travel between destinations.

Red Tide

The red tide is a colorful misnomer for a species of blooming single-celled bacteria that appear red with seasonal regularity.  The danger presented by what would normally be a smorgasbord of phytoplankton is the virulent neurotoxin these bacteria give off.  It is a quick and efficient poison, killing most everything that simply swims too close to their infected waters.

Normally avoided at all costs, the currents of Elqua's oceans will sometimes drag the red tide right through heavily populated areas of the Known World, leaving a wake of destruction as they pass.  The civilized races consider it to be every person's humanitarian duty to warn unsuspecting settlements of an encroaching red tide, even in times of hostility.  This is a practice shared by the Locanth, though not any of the other primitive races.

Black Water

Only a rumor, but stories have begun surfacing of a new kind of red tide.  Inky black, as if absorbing all color and light from reality, spreading blobs of oozing darkness have apparently been appearing in the most remote reaches of the hinterseas.  Unlike the red tide, this black water does not kill an unsuspecting prey, but instead slowly engulfs it within it viscous tendrils.  However, no quantifiable evidence of its existence has ever been found, and with the tale's veracity coming from "a friend of a friend", most discount it as superstitious nonsense.

Endless Blue - Week 07 - Shore, Shoals, and Shelf

Oceanography

Topographical zones

Despite its submergence beneath fathoms of water, Elqua is little different from any other world.  It has mountains and valleys, rolling hills and wide plains, shallow basins and expansive mesas.  The main difference between the more familiar world and the world of endless blue is that Elqua’s ocean level is far higher than most.  The tallest peaks of mountains in a normal realm appear as island archipelagos here, and what would be sea level for a more familiar world becomes a kind of underwater balcony before the drop into the darkness of the ocean floor.

Understanding the logistics of Elqua requires the acceptance that the oceans are comprised of three levels, layers that cut across the depths of the world’s water: the Shore, the Shoals, and the Shelf.

The first layer is known as the Shore, and it is composed of the sea floor that directly touches land at the water’s edge and extends approximately 200 feet from the surface.  Usually defined as “lit water”, the visible spectrum of light fully illuminates this layer along the coast of what little land breaks the waves.  Wildlife of vivid and varied color thrive as the Sun warms these waters thoroughly, allowing more traditional ecosystems to continue and flourish, and as such surface predators use these coastal areas as hunting grounds.  This area includes the waterline gained and lost by the complex tides of Elqua.

Next come the Shoals, or “dark water”.  This far down – to about 650’ – ambient light has begun to be absorbed by the expanse of water above.  Cooler colors begin to look muted and muddy, and the warmer colors are little more than black.  Shades and hues become washed out and indistinguishable.  With less light, the water is cooler here, and requires a modicum of protection to withstand the temperature.  The land begins to slant downward more aggressively, and can extend outward this way for miles and miles in all directions.  The sea floor here would be the equivalent of the plains on a dryer world, ie, large swaths of relatively flat land for as far as the eye can see.  The majority of life on Elqua inhabits this zone.

Finally is the Shelf.  Light has all but been swallowed up, and normal vision is useless.  Darkness is the norm here, and due to the complications of maintaining life at these depths, the few races that live here are the more varied and extreme.  Insulated from the heat of the sun, significant adaptation must be made to avoid hypothermia.  Here the continental plates take a sharper slope downward, forming the trenches and basins of the deepest oceans.

The races of the Endless Blue setting are scattered across these striped regions.  Some, like the Kouton, are tied closely to the Shore due to biological need.  Others, such as the Orcans, populate the Shelf almost exclusively.  Then there are the Ceph, whom are found everywhere, in a manner reinforcing the ancient bigotry that they are essentially vermin that have worked their way into every hidden nook and cranny of decent Elquan life.

Travel

Even a basic grasp of geography would tell you the shortest route between two points is a straight line.  While this is difficult to accomplish above water due to the curvature of solid land, it is much easier to achieve under the waves.

The seafloor is much like a valley, but on a vastly larger scale.  The tips of the hills would be the Shore, the slope of the hills the Shoals, and the valley bottom itself the Shelf.  Short of some kind of magic, to travel from hilltop-to-hilltop on dry land requires a traveler to climb down one embankment, hike across the valley bottom, and then scale up the opposite slope.  But underwater, the inherent tendency for matter to float (called buoyancy) allows travelers to simply swim straight across from hilltop-to-hilltop, avoiding the valley altogether.

However, there are dangers to this.  Foremost among them is “water blindness”.  Due to the light-absorbing properties of water and the particulate matter suspended therein, vision is often limited.  While in the Shores land is almost always visible, floating above the center of the hypothetical valley may put hilltops beyond visual range. With no point of reference, it is quite easy to become disoriented and lose one’s way.  Even rising to the surface is of little help in mid-ocean, where the endless horizon of rising and falling waves is rarely broken by a glimpse of land.

The next danger is the vulnerability.  With solid earth firmly beneath your feet, it is generally a safe assumption that nothing will burst up out of the ground and swallow an unwary traveler.  However, when afloat in the water, danger can approach in not just the hemisphere above, but from below as well.  With 360^o cube degrees of potential danger, it makes crossing “open waters” a risky endeavor.

The risk of cross-currents adds to the difficulty of travel.  While a body of water may appear as a languid pool, the flow of water layers can work against passage, dragging the helpless victim at immense speeds into danger.  These currents can be as weak as a trickle, or as strong as raging river rapids.  And when submerged in total water, visually discerning these tidal forces is nearly impossible as they are for all intents invisible to simple sight.  The development of infravision – seeing into the infrared spectrum normally given off by heat – has allowed some creatures to deal with this ever-present and quickly changing threat.

Finally, there is the effect environmental space has on the size that lifeforms can theoretically achieve.  With more space, creatures that normally would be expected to grow to a moderate size – like say a squid – can grow to a colossal scale.  With the volume of the oceans on Elqua, there is no gauging to what extremes a creature might reach.  Larger predators that may move faster, swim deeper, and consume huge groups of Pisceans like they were microscopic plankton.  Even animals thought as harmless due to their normal diminutive size become hazardous threats when their scale is multiplied by a magnitude or two.

In general, it is safer to skirt along the seabed when traveling.  It provides protection in the form of shelter and opportunities to hide that are simply impossible floating in the middle of the deep blue.  On the other hand, there are some risks in traveling along the ocean floor.  Traveling too deep runs the risk of dangers from ocean pressure – the weight of all that water overhead pressing down on a creature.  The deeper one sinks, the greater the weight pressing down on their body.  If they are not designed to resist these heightened pressures, the creature will literally be crushed from the forces.

Life beneath the waves of Elqua is difficult, but manageable.  It takes a different mindset to view what would normally be a boundary for a landwalker as the opportunity it is to a waterdiver.  The sharp, straight borders of our world are replaced with the gradual phasing of darkness, pressure, and cold.  But despite all this, societies flourish under the seas of the Endless Blue.

Endless Blue - Week 06 - Map of the Known World

Oceanography

There is a plethora of intelligence beneath the waves of Elqua, and like any peoples, they group together with their neighbors and form communities.  Communities in the Endless Blue setting are defined by the body of water that holds the society, or “homesea”.  While they may seem to consist of a single species, immigration over the centuries has not left a single one without some level of intermixing.

On this water world, the nations formed due to geological formations and historical conflict, and thus are now clustered around a central area in the Eastern hemisphere.  With little knowledge of beyond its claustrophobic borders, this known world is broken down into three concentric divisions.

The Core

The Core is defined as the ruins of the Kraken Empire and the Crèche of Civilization.  Once populated, the area is now considered cursed and blessed (respectively), and much of the politics of the aquatic nations revolve around either coveting or despising the Core.
The main geographical feature of the Core is the Maw of the Kraken, the actual homesea of the once mighty Kraken Empire.  The borderseas around this area once belonged to other nations but was usurped during the Kraken Occupation.  Now, even long after the fall of the invaders, the area around the Maw is avoided at all costs.
The Crèche is treated as holy waters, and nearly every race wishes to claim it as their own.  It’ sea-beds are the richest in agricultural and mineralogical resources that, due to the contention between the races, remains nearly pristine from the era of the Icht Dominion.

The Periphery

The Periphery is comprised of the four civilized nations, which are clustered around the Core: the Cetacean Oceans, the Chelon Seas, the Lumulus Basin, and the Mer Currents.  These nations have relatively favorable conditions for harvesting crops and raising livestock, and as a result are the more affluent nations.

The Hinterseas

The Hinterseas are the area loosely made up of the nations of the primitive races: the Kouton Bay, the Locanth Gulf, the Sahaguin Lagoons, and the Yaun-Teel Bights.  They surround the Periphery, effectively corralling the civilized races inward towards the Core or each other’s territories.  At the more climatic extremes, these nations have poor natural resources to sustain their peoples, and thus results in unavoidable poaching on the wealthier nations’ borders.

Bodies of Water
While nations maintain "no mer's seas" along their borders, this does not keep the natural encroachment of plants and animals across these imaginary lines.  With the primitive races that still maintain a nomadic lifestyle, following the herds on their instinctive migrations sometimes brings them into territorial conflicts with the indigenous denizens.

Cetacean Oceans
To the north and west of the Kraken’s Maw, the Cetacean Oceans are a deep double-impact crater that is claimed to include the deepest point on all of Elqua.  It is an expansive, fathomless place well suited for the Orcan race.  The phytoplankton (the lowest link of the food chain for the entire world) in this area is plentiful and varied, enabling the Orcan peoples to turn inward into the craters in their quest for new feeding grounds.  It is perhaps the best balanced area, with sufficient Shore, Shoal, and Shelf areas to keep the nation nearly autonomous and independent of imports from the other nations.

Chelon Sea
The Chelon Sea is nearly completely comprised of Shoals, a rolling sea-bed of rich silt and vital sediments.  Its gentle, dependable currents keep the sea temperate even at its most northern places.  Flora and fauna of the Chelon Sea is perhaps the most varied, if not the most beautiful, in all the world of Elqua.  It is referred to by its people as nature’s utopia, where the inhabitants live in harmony with the surroundings.  Here, amid the placid beauty, lies the Abyss, a sheer vertical drop in a vast plains area of the Shoals zone that stretches for miles.

Kouton Bay
To the north and west of the Cetacean Ocean, the Kouton Bay arcs around the Orcan homesea from the Locanth Gulf to the Yaun-Teel Bights.  It’s deep, cold currents are rife with wildlife.  The Bay of Kouton is the spawning waters for many of the main fish species that make up the diet of the civilized and primitive races alike.

Locanth Gulf
The Gulf of Locanth is the central populated area of the Locanth Gulf, and reaches northward to the Kouton Bay and southward to the Lumulus Basin.  The most westward of the aquatic nations, it is here that the plant ricelqua was discovered, where it grows more prevalent than seaweed.

Lumulus Basin
The deep, concave basin populated by the Lumulus is riddled with thermal vents that become more and more frequent the further south traveled towards a particularly volcanic portion of the Spine of the World.  With such little Shore and Shoal zones, agricultural imports are vitally important to support the Lumulite population.  It is the only civilized nation that has an outer border not blocked by one of the primitive races, butting out between the Bay of Kouton and the Gulf of Locanth.

Mer Currents
Perhaps the most densely populated waters on Elqua, the various Currents of Mer are loosely banded together as a single nation.  Bordering on the Crèche of Civilization, the Mer Currents benefit from species migration out of the untouched holy sea, and has allowed its tribes (each a “current” in the nation’s name) to explode with unparalleled success.

Sahaguin Lagoons
Located between the Crèche of Civilization and the southern ice cap, the Sahaguin Lagoons border on the ruins of the Kraken Empire and the Mer Currents.  It follows the Shade of the Sargasso Ring – the area wrapping around the globe of Elqua where the planet’s green rings cast an emerald twilight – quite closely.  It is comprised of a string of lagoons and other Shoal-level areas randomly dotted along the islands in that area.  At its south-most point it is suddenly truncated by the frozen barricade that is the southern polar ice-cap.

Yaun-Teel Bights
The Yaun-Teel Bights neighbor the Chelon Sea and the Mer Currents to the north, and dip down towards the Sahaguin Lagoons to the east.  Essentially barren due to the misuse at the hands of its own inhabitants, the Yaun-Teel resort to heavy raiding of the Chelon and Mer territories to sustain themselves.

What lies beyond the known world is a mystery.  Until now, there has been plenty of room for the races of Elqua to grow and develop.  A few – the brave, the ostracized, the insane – have traveled the seas beyond, but only tales and supposition remain as to what final fate awaited them.

Endless Blue - Week 05 - Elqua

Oceanography

Deceptively tranquil, the wide blue swaths of Elqua’s oceans belie a complex geographical system beneath the surface of the Endless Blue setting's water world.

This holomographic view (Mollweide projection) shows the scattered links of island chains on Elqua and areas of the Shore around them in cyan, a rough approximation of the Shoals in light blue, and the Shelf in deep dark blue. The intelligent races of the Endless Blue setting straddle these zones in a precarious attempt to not encroach on other’s territory, but still need their own room to grow. This tangled web-work of sub-aquatic sandbars and islands make the division of living space somewhat hazardous and quite complex.

The major geographical feature that can be seen is known as the Spine of the World, a series of mountain tops peaking out of the seas, forming several island archipelagos in an almost complete circle around the globe. Despite the continental drift of the eight major tectonic plates (and four minor), these chains of tiny islands are still roughly synchronous with the world’s planetary ring, fating these areas to an ever-present semi-green dusk known as the Sargasso Ring. This shadow does move slowly with the passage of time, but a clearly identifiable range has been determined by the natives, who live accordingly.

The arctic and Antarctic circles are defined by the 30° longitude (or represented with the sigil λ) from each pole. These mark the circle around Elqua where the sun begins to stay above or below the horizon for a full 24 hours. The southern circle is dominated by a massive polar icecap. A humongous permafrost monolith that nearly fills the Antarctic Circle, it is a solid slab of ice from surface to ocean floor, and acts like a barrier along the borders of the southern nations, preventing migration in that direction. Its northern parallel lacks a similar sheet of ice, but does have one of the world’s largest land masses nearly at the magnetic pole – an islet with an tapering peninsula pointing eerily, almost accusingly, toward the north pole…

At about 9° λ each are Elqua’s breath-taking aurorea, made much the more spectacular due to the high levels of noble gases in Elqua’s atmosphere that fluoresce greatly as the ionized oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere give off light, and can easily be seen from beneath the shallow waters of the Shore. The wavy, cascading undulation of the aurorae have been likened to gossamer seas overhead, and have been dubbed The Tides Above and The Currents in the Sky for the north and south poles, respectively. It is one of the few phenomena from above the waves that possess anything close to a positive association, in the face of the hellish damnation that Elquan religions have reinforced in the populace.

The tropics of Cetacean and Kraken lie at approximately 64° λ. The Tropic of Cetacean is the line of longitude that circles the globe at the northernmost point where the sun is still directly overhead at noon, usually on the summer solstice. Conversely, the Tropic of Kraken is the southernmost point on the winter solstice. The area between these two circles is the tropics, and serves as the best place for horticultural harvesting. Both longitudes are named after the nations that are bisected by the lines of longitude.

The Prime Meridian is defined as the line of latitude (signified with a symbol φ) that runs over the deepest known point on Elqua, in the Cetacean Ocean. It was chosen arbitrarily (some would say disparagingly) by the Chelon, whom are credited with the creation of the geographic coordinate system. Modern cartographers argue that the point in question is hardly the deepest point on the ocean floor, giving the Abyss in the Chelon’s own sea as just one example. Despite this, Chelonian oceanographers remain steadfast in their reason and shut-mouthed in the face of contrary evidence, and the Orcan resolutely refuse to allow any outsider that far into their borders.  Along with the 180th latitude, the prime meridian forms the boundary between the western and eastern hemisphere.

Continents
Unlike our world, where the ocean’s edge helps form the shape of continents, Elqua’s tectonic plates are more eroded from constant ocean currents. To complicate this, sometime in the world’s past the planet was bombarded by meteoric activity, as evidenced by the plentiful number of crater basins forming the deepest depths of the world. Most likely the planet was impacted by multiple comets of massive size, fracturing in the unique atmosphere and filling the planet with its immense oceans with water. As a consequence, the national borders of Elqua’s countries are defined more loosely than those of our own. “No Mer’s Waters” exist between nations, serving as both buffer zones between expanding populaces and also as a kind of national park, where wildlife has ample opportunity to refresh its numbers from the predations of homo Pisceans.

Crèche of Civilization

One specific crater is of special significance to the denizens of Elqua. It is called the Crèche of Civilization, so named as the intelligent races trace back their history to this relatively shallow but wide basin as the birth place of Piscean life. It is here it is believed that the now-extinct Icth originally rose to prominence, and most every race calls it their mother sea.

Maw of the Kraken

A ring of islands formed by a crater that once delineated the Kraken homewaters, the Maw looks like the distended, wide-open jaws of a gargantuan megalodon breaking the surface to feed. While most of the occupied seas were reclaimed when the Kraken Empire fell, the waters inside the Maw are still avoided at all costs as it is believed that much of the Kraken’s foul magics still permeate the ruins.

Migrating Islands

One of the strangest geological formations on Elqua is the rare, solitary floating islets. While most islands are either formed by volcanic eruption or tectonic pressure pushing the seabed to the surface, there are a handful of large islands that are not anchored into the sea floor. Like icebergs made of rock and dirt instead of ice and snow, these islands float slowly on the waves of the myriad seas independent of tectonic plates and continental drift. Just like icebergs, the larger volume of these floating landmasses bobs beneath the surface, just as clustered with wildlife as any reef or shoreline.