Author Phil Colman had been taking people over the Long Reef Shore platform (Sydney) for the best part of half a century and the original purpose of the book was to provide plain English answers to questions he met time and again.

The idea grew and Phil wrote short accounts on many topics then it became a joint effort when co-author Peter Mitchell turned up with geological knowledge and suggested that it should all be run together and illustrated. Just like the organisms we talk about the book grew, drafts came and went and it got bigger. We drew most of our examples from Long Reef because we knew it well and then we slowly found ourselves talking about places in Victoria and New Zealand where the stories were very similar.

A South African friend wrote to say that he was quite happy to use our book with his students on rocky shores and we realized that Long Reef was just a convenient example of most of the processes and relationships that can be seen almost anywhere in the temperate inter-tidal world. Patterns of species distribution, life strategies, dispersal methods, modes of communication, and species survival stories are much the same in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and even in the Mediterranean.

The individual species are different but the same families occupy the same niches in all those places. Littorinids are always 'up there', barnacles cluster at the same levels of the tide and waves, and similar looking kelp lives just below the low tide level.