#bheemili

We tend to treat bright tropical sunlight as an actinic agent that deteriorates and damages structures. And indeed it does. Everything from medicine tablets and liquids, to beach-chairs, wine and of course us, wrinkling under the Sun, are damaged by it.

But on occasion sunlight can create poetry - and purity - as witness the remnants of this crustacean carapace bleached into a beautiful eburnean white by the relentless sun, giving the dead beast a second resurrection as it were, it exhibiting far greater alabaster beauty in death than it did in life, beautifully coloured though it was even in life.

The velocity of a stream decreases from a maximum at the center to a minimum - near zero - at the banks, the velocity profile usually a parabolic function, or a linear function, of velocity versus distance from the bank.

The reason why the velocity is so low near the banks is due to friction, a fact that these tiny fish, milling around in the waters immediately adjacent to the sandy bank, utilize to prevent themselves from being swept downstream and out to sea.

Sudden and random surges in the velocity of the river however force them to adopt a schooling configuration - the top two photos, versus the randomly oriented positions of the fish in the shoal of the last two photos - and actively swim in an upstream direction in order to hold their position at the bank.

Fishing boats being built on Bheemili Beach. These boats were sufficiently large giants - the bird perched on one of the bulkhead beams providing scale -  that, both technically and semantically, they could be called ships.