March 20 Summary and Analysis

The vessel travels to Espiritu Santo Island as their next collecting stop. This is an area with sandy beaches and large rocks resting on the sand, under which there may be interesting creatures. Everyone except Tony goes ashore to help with the collecting, and they find many interesting sea cucumbers and brittle-stars. At this point, their specimen bottles are starting to fill up, so if they have seen a species before, they begin just noting it in the log rather than continuing to collect it. Steinbeck spends some time wondering why some species seem to dominate certain areas and whether it is some inherent characteristic of the area or the species, or whether it is by chance—such as which species got there first this year.

He then likens this struggle for dominance to that of humans trying to claim...