30/05/2026
Common starfish in the North Sea, during the spawning season, gather in dense aggregations, or release eggs and s***m directly into the water column — a process known as broadcast spawning.
At the beginning of this week, just beyond Belhaven Bridge, Dunbar, along the high-water tide line, I found an entire stretch of shore packed with them.
Thousands upon thousands. Perhaps far more. What felt like millions.
A mass grave of starfish.
They were pale and whitish, all colour gone from them, as if the sea had washed them out before laying them down. Yet they were still soft to the touch — not dry, not hardened, not long dead. Freshly waved ashore.
Some seemed not entirely dead yet, but lifeless and weak, as if dying without resistance in a slow, timeless fading. The end of their cycle, perhaps. The sea having gathered them, spent them, and then returned them to the shore.
I had never seen anything like it.
It was beautiful and terrible at the same time. Not a bright spectacle, but a bleached and silent one: so much life, suddenly visible because it had ended.
And it touched me more than I expected.
Wild swimmers were at Wardie Bay in Edinburgh when they came across the animals.
