Where The Wild Things Are
The strange world of undersea life is even stranger than you think.
By Thomas Urquhart
I had volunteered to help my friend Jim clean the bottom of his dinghy. The day before, as we rowed out to his mooring, a green mane -- a summer's worth of marine concupiscence -- had trailed after us. Now, with the hull upside down on the dock, what had started as a chore turned into a treasure hunt.A boat's bottom is teeming with life that, to the uninitiated, rivals a rain forest in its wondrous qualities. That is, if the boat has not been treated with an anti-fouling paint like tributyltin, or TBT.
