With nearly 16 km of accessible beaches, it’s not hard to find a Mumbaikar who swears by the therapeutic effects of sitting by the city’s shoreline; some regulars might even call it ‘home’. Marine life expert Shaunak Modi breaks our bubble — the real residents, he says, are not the hurried Mumbaikars finding respite in the beaches, but more than 600 species of sea slugs, snails and octopus that have quietly inhabited the intertidal zones (see box) on the shores since time immemorial. Yet, they remain largely under-researched. The India Intertidal BioBlitz 2025, a large-scale collaborative citizen initiative, is set to change that.

Spread across 10 days, to account for fluctuating tidal activity across the coast, the effort will be joined by naturalists from Rushikonda and Thotlakonda beaches in Andhra Pradesh, Karwar in Karnataka, Baga and Bambolim in Goa, Sitapur and Govind Nagar beaches in the Andamans, Nandgaon and Vengurla in Konkan, Minicoy and Kavaratti in Lakshadweep and other locations in addition to local efforts at the Juhu, Nepean Sea Road, Haji Ali and Carter Road shores in Mumbai. “The end goal is to get a snapshot of the existing species and the condition of the tide pools to help us plan our conservation efforts. It’s the first step towards something larger in scale akin to the popular nationwide bird counts,” says Modi.