MaraTime: Time as Adaptation

This article is part of ‘Time and Tide’, a series of essays by Tasneem Khan. This is the fourth of the collection. Click here to read the other articles in the series.

Contemplating and connecting.

Morphology, improvisation, and the choreography of survival.

There is a clock in every body and each species keeps its own time. Evolutionary time ticks not in hours but in adaptations: in limbs, in lungs, in the way an eye learns to bend light beneath the tide. We tend to think of time as a sequence of dates, but nature doesn’t read calendars—it reads conditions. It responds. It adjusts. It endures.

In marine ecosystems, time is relative, seconds measured in tidal tables and controlled by moon shadows, in the frequency of storms and the slow, deep chemical sigh of warming seas. Adaptation is how life keeps time—with shape, strategy and instinct. Phenology might track when barnacles spawn or jellyfish bloom, but adaptation records how the rhythms of the seasons shape the body, its form and function, at every scale.

Each species steps into its role without a script, guided by inherited memory and ecological intuition. The ocean cues its lines with salinity shifts, tidal variations, sun angles, gas blends, and living chemistries. Then, life answers back. Like an improv act in slow motion, over millennia. 

Evolution is not perfection, but compromise. Each adaptation is a quiet negotiation between what the changing world demands and what the body can offer. Living at edges of land and water somehow amplifies and exaggerates adaptations.
Where conditions tighten, bodies specialise. Where space is scarce, adaptation sharpens. 

Perhaps this is why I am drawn to islands, self-contained ecosystems suspended in salt and possibility. They are the testing grounds for nature’s improvisation, exaggerated and bare, smaller, larger, stranger, and often more specific. As David Quammen writes in The Song of the Dodo (1996), “islands are where species go to play by different rules.” And, without realising it, I went to play too, journeying from island to island.

A life of island-exploration requires its own adaptations. This has been a physiological and introspective realisation as my slow journeys meandered from archipelagos to atolls. I started this unplanned, embodied process of learning in the once-fragmented seven islands of Bombay. Mumbai, as we know it, is stitched together by colonial engineering and tidal reclamation. Two decades later, I crossed over to the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, 572 islands on India’s eastern frontier—submerged mountains rising from the Bay of Bengal. Then, living among the limestone karst islands of Phang Nga Bay, I documented their vertical cliffs carved by monsoon rains, the granite domes of the Similan Islands, and the undulating, forest-cloaked geology of the Mergui Archipelago—still holding the mystery of uncharted reefs and Moken memory. This archipelagic life asks for a constant reshaping of the self in response to each place.

I have wandered through the Arctic light of Lofoten—islands rising like vertebrae from Norway’s glacial spine—and crossed the archipelagic hum of Stockholm, whose water-woven form, like Mumbai’s, blurs city and sea. Above the Arctic Circle, my body forgot the clock and followed the sun. The sun that never set—it only dipped, letting dusk slip straight into twilight. Days stretched on, strangely endless. Bees buzzed at midnight, seals surfaced at noon, and we climbed mountains and swam through seaweed forests, when the light invited us, uncaring of the hour—our rhythms quietly syncing with the restless summer energy of the north. I was struck by how places and ecosystems can rewire us—how light alone can reshape behaviour, dissolve routines, and offer the body a new kind of knowing.

In Sri Lanka—an island of myth and biodiversity—I first learned to read the language of shipwrecks, a lesson in how sharp bathymetric gradients dictate ecological stories. Here geography shapes both history and habitat across micro and macro timelines. In those bluest of blue waters with gigantic ships, I also experienced my most intimate and humbling encounters with Earth’s largest extant creatures: blue whales. 

These giants—whose Balaenopteridae lineage stretch back nearly five million years—can dive a thousand meters and can live for up to a century. They breathe the same air as us and breach the surface to share moments of our horizon. The ocean’s meniscus holds more than water; it marks the threshold between two ways of remembering time. While human memory spans generations, etched in stories, records, and monuments, the whales’ memories are borne in the body and mapped in the sea. Blue whales are living repositories of deep time, their generational knowledge transcending any single coastline, timeline or myopic motivation for conquest, drawing from abyssal depths and ancestral migrations. Their songs and migrations weave a nuanced narrative of connectivity and urgent adaptation. 

Now, in Ireland, an island that teaches through stone and wind, I walk shorelines shaped by ice, basalt, bog, and folklore.

Islands compress the vast into the intimate. By their scale, solitude, and startling intensities.
Each one a compass. Each one an evolving monument.
Each one a living pastiche of adaptation and resilience.

Islands are laboratories of life, and also sites of loss. Because, while isolation fuels physiological invention, it also makes species vulnerable. Cut off from the gene flow, a new clock starts ticking. What flourishes on an island might not survive a continental re-entry. What evolves here often becomes endemic—found nowhere else on Earth—and its eventual disappearance is irrevocable. This is the essence of island biogeography, a theory born from the field notebooks of MacArthur and Wilson which predicts species richness based on island size and distance from mainland. On an island, one can feel the truth of this theory viscerally. In the way the last few surviving coconut crabs still build underground labyrinths on remote shores; the way a magnificent bird might nest nowhere else on Earth but in the tall trees that grow on a single dormant oceanic volcano. Extinction becomes intimate when it happens in a single cove, along a single slope, on a single morning. I think of how tightly tuned island species are to their place; how the curve of a shell, the timing of a tide, the pitch of a mating call becomes their entire survival code. When their habitat shifts faster than their bodies can respond, adaptation runs out of time. 

Extinction is not an event. It’s an erosion. A quiet unraveling.

In my own work, I return to islands not viewing them as sites of research but as collaborators. I live with them. They teach me to look slowly. From the coral atolls of the Indian Ocean to the seaweed-fringed edges of the Atlantic, islands are diaries of time—each one a slow, biological sentence still being written.

To witness time as adaptation is to read this sentence with care.
To live with islands is to carry both their uniqueness and their fragility. And while it is starkly visible in these fragments of land adrift in great waters,
all life is islanded—contingent, evolving, temporary. Because adaptation, for all its ingenuity, walks a razor’s edge.
For every form that flourishes, another falters.
For every brilliant mutation, there is a silence where a grassland no longer sings. Adaptation and extinction are twin forces, dancing across evolutionary time, shaping coastlines, wingspans, spawning rituals, and migration routes. Sometimes, their steps are so entwined we cannot tell if a species is adapting or vanishing—if it’s a last performance, or the first line of something new. 

If extinction is forgetting, adaptation is remembering differently.
And in that difference—finned, feathered, shelled, or spored—is the continuity of life itself.

Even our identities are personal manuscripts of adaptation, like the whorls of a shell or the rings of a tree. A condensed echo of all the responses, adjustments, and resilience we embody—a poem and process of places and times, recording the hidden stories of flourishing and failure.

Let’s make space for improbable lives at the edge. Step off the page and into your own shorelines—real or imagined. Walk slowly. Notice the tides of your days and the islands of your memories. Think deeply about moments of resilience and of resistance. 

Observe the stories encoded in every breath and imprint of the lifeforms around you—we are already a part of this dance of adaptation that is life itself.