A Tidepool and A Feeding Frenzy

Posted on September 7, 2002 in Creatures

Somehow Lynn’s blog got messed up after she tried to add categories. I pressed keys and grumbled as queer errors surfaced. “How do you do this?” I groaned at her. “I don’t know what your problem is! The only cure I can think of is to take you to a shaman to have your evil klutz spirit removed.” After half an hour of fruitlessly replacing templates, I put the keyboard down. I couldn’t handle this in my closeted condition. I had to get out. I let Lynn choose where and she chose the beach.

We explored the Los Trancos section of Crystal Cove State Park, a part that we’d never been to before.
The sea had withdrawn from the serrated reefs, leaving long inlets, stranded weeds, and a couple of deep holes which proved to be full of life. Sculpin darted around like sphinx moths. Hermit crabs dragged their moon shells across undulating terraces and tiny grey opaleyes pecked at red seaweed. A couple some ten or twenty years older than us came by. The man was a fisherman. He squatted by the hole, identifying species for us. Then he looked around. “Let me get a bit of mussel.” He hopped across a narrow inlet, pulled off a large blue mollusk, broke it open with a stone, and dropped it in the hole.

The sculpin and the opal eye snatched for the orange flesh first. “Look at that twist and pull,” the fisherman said as the fish pulled out the meat. “You can catch anything on this reef using mussels,” he said.

The little fish had to eat quickly because crabs swarmed out of crevices. Hermit crabs lumbered in first, followed by small, brown striped monsters which were about an inch across on the shell. The fish didn’t challenge the crustaceans. They pulled back while the largest of the crawlers went for the lip of the shellfish and helped themselves to the offering.

The fisherman’s wife begged him to get more bait. He fetched a handful of shells, cracked them as before, and laid them, at our request, out on a higher shelf where we hoped to attract the fish for a closer view. The fish didn’t see the broken bivalves, so we pushed them off the terrace into the bottom of the hole. By this time the hermit crabs had completely covered the first mussel shell. The sculpin and the opaleye loitered nearby, bitter about the loss of their dining privileges to the better armed crabs. The larger, free-walking crabs shoved the hermit crabs out of the way and yanked out large gobs of the new offerings. The larger sculpin dashed and bit at the shreds that tailed the crabs as they sought to bring their catch back to the crevices lining the sides of the whole. “The whole bottom’s come alive,” said the woman. “Look at that.”

The fisherman laughed. “I’ve gone and upset the whole ecology,” he said.

Click on the photo to get a look at a well-camouflaged sculpin.

To see what you can do to curb idiotic real estate development right up against the park, click here.