Here come the fish!

Today was the first warm day of 2009 in Milford. How does a day qualify to be determined "warm"? When you can sit on the beach in your beach chair in your bathing suit.

And today was that day. But of course, ever since I became an officially infatuated aquarist, the idea of coming to the beach without my aquarium gear is strange and alien. I didn't last long in the beach chair. Neither did my little sister Kira but then she's all of 8.

Wading through the pools left by the retreating tide, turning over rocks muttering for us to leave them alone, probing the large heads of seaweed lying flat and dull on the wet sand waiting for the high tide to return them to their ethereal marine beauty. Found four sea fleas and a few perfect rocks with barnacles and seaweed. Put those in the large white bucket with some fresh seawater to tide them over till we introduce them to their new home.

And then we saw them.

The first fish of the season. In a large tidal pool not too far from where we were. Mud minnows probably, or mummi chugs. Breathless, I called over to Andres and my mother who had joined us. Kira and I wasted no time. Got our green aquarium nets and in we went. But running (read: sloshing like a drunk elephant) after the minnows was proving to be frustrating—after all, they are made for this environment, are hydrodynamic, and much too nimble for our clumsy tools.

Teamwork, however, won the day. (Didn't I read that somewhere in some how-t0-succeed-in-business book?) Kira snuck up on one of the minnows, it panicked and raced straight into my net. Woo hoo!

Into the bucket my dear, you're going to have a very posh life now.

I relax in the beach chair, content with the day's achievements.

"Why don't you get another one, so it can have a friend?" Andres offers up nonchalantly. I sit there, looking at him like a fish out of water and peering down into the bucket at the now seemingly lonely minnow. Everything in moderation, right? But one fish isn't moderate, it's downright cruel and unusual treatment of animals to isolate the very sociable minnow.

Kira at this point is busy building a sand castle so I go to brave the odds on my own.

I am still not sure how I managed but I did catch a second minnow! It really just takes patience, faith that that little living thing knows you do not intend to harm it, and a little observation and technique.

And then a very careful ride back home, where the two minnows were gently welcomed into the wonderful world of our Aquarium.

Here is one of the minnows (although I do have to get a better shot. They just won't sit still for me.)

Pulgon Rising

So it's now twelve hours later, 10:30pm and we are once again staring into the Aquarium. But tonight we have a special reason to stare.

The Pulgon has emerged.

Remember the little sand crab Andres caught a few weeks ago? We call him Pulgon, that's his Spanish name. "Sand crab" is just so... unsexy.

So anyway, pulgones, or sand crabs (see here below one we grabbed on a Florida beach a few years ago) spend most of their time burrowed in sand.

They do come out to filter microscopic organisms, but are extremely hard to find. If you know where to look, and how to spot them, you can see them scurrying like little fleas on turbo power across the sand. They pop out for a split second and burrow back in again in about a blink or less.

But you can catch them—we do it by lunging at the spot where the little guy has just burrowed, and then very gently filtering the sand through our fingers. That's how we got the little one in Florida, and that's how Andres got the Pulgon for our Aquarium.

Except now we can't exactly lunge at the sand. When we first put him in, he swam around for 1.5 seconds and in a flash was buried somewhere in the back of the Aquarium. Then we didn't see him for a week. Not a peep! So we thought, oh gosh maybe he didn't make it.

But tonight our fears were calmed. It happened when we rubbed apart a little piece of bunker for the new inhabitants the minnows. The oil and scent of the bunker must have overpowered the Pulgon's natural instinct for timidity: first we caught an area of the sand moving, as if something were rummaging around underneath.

Then, a few seconds later, the Pulgon shot up, swam around in a little circle, then divebombed back into the substrate. But this time he stuck his eyes and his antennae out:

Needless to say, Andres and I were spellbound. We have spent the past hour just watching him, oohing and awe-ing about his every move. Pathetic no? We of course don't think so but we are heavily biased.

I mean, how often is it that you see this incredibly intricate, fragile yet tough little living thing peeking out from the sand at you? So close that you can see its eyeballs.

But Pulgon wasn't done with us yet. He treated us to a real show: right there mere centimeters away from us, he whipped out his filtering whiskers. I did my best to immortalize those as well on digital film, but without a high-speed camera that was pretty much impossible. So here is a shot of the little cowboy doin' his thang....

...and another shot of his mouth or filtering mechanism, with a little more detail.

I'm going to put the camera down now and enjoy this magical moment before he disappears for another week....

The Worm Chronicles/Part I

Took my morning walk today, down to the beach. Clear skies, sunny day, right after a rain so the beach was silky smooth. No humans had walked it yet today.

As I skipped down the stairs, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a thick pink body lying on the sand.

A worm. Alive.

I couldn't believe my luck. Thrilled beyond words, I hunted down an oyster shell—because, after all, I was not quite excited enough to touch it with my bare hands—and picked it up. Nice, healthy color. No wounds to indicate some higher species tried to eat it. No fungi or other apparent diseases.

Definitely a contender for the Aquarium.

And so in he went, into my tomato-jar-turned-saltwater carrying case. At home, I slipped him into the Aquarium and peered closer to watch how he acclimates.

First reaction, he coiled up in the front left corner and whipped about a little, no doubt confused and feeling out of place. Here he is:

Nice, no? In fact let me give you a closer look at his spines:

Now you know why I don't pick up sea worms with my bare hands. Nothing to do with being a girl. Not even my seasoned fisherman husband would touch it. You never know what kind of poison or toxic juices these creatures have.

Oh, he's now burrowing into the substrate. Fleshy pink segments disappearing into the white coral sand, dislodging the rocks above. Let's let him dig in.

Death during prime time

"We have a problem."

I know that undercurrent of Andres' voice. It means business. I was watching CNN, and he was peering intently into the Aquarium.

"The anemone is eating one of the fleas."

"What!" I exclaimed, rushing over.

I couldn't believe my eyes. The little tube anemone, one of the original three that had been carried over on the Anemone Rock, which had, if you will remember, climbed from the Rock up onto the back wall of the Sea Aquarium, was indeed, and in fact, sucking up one of the sea fleas.

The flea was dead as a doornail, no question about it. What creeped me out was the way it was being eaten. Its rear end was literally being dissolved by the sea anemone. Don't believe me? Here, check this out:

OK so it's blurry. But YOU try and focus on a 2-centimeter violent death on the back wall of a 10-gallon aquarium through refracting water currents with a fixed macro lens. Now I understand all those citizen photographers of the Lochness monster, Big Foot, and UFO's. It's hard to focus when you're excited.

Andres explained that sea anemones are actually poisonous. That's how they catch their prey. Their tentacles sting unsuspecting creatures as they float or swim by, then pull them into their mouths and digest them alive. Sounds like a lot of fun. Could you apply that technique to business development? I wonder.

Sea anemones not pretty flowers or plants that the uninitiated eye perceives them to be (yes that would be me 3 weeks ago). They are what you call "First Animals", meaning they have some serious seniority privileges in the evolutionary hierarchy of Life. In other words, move over T. Boone Pickens.

OK so let's go over this again. The lesson we learned today is,

SEA ANEMONE

+

SEA FLEA

=

NOT A HAPPY ENDING.

p.s. Oh, and by the way, little cute sea anemone. Thy name now be Fleakiller.

Goodbye Bob

As much as it pains me, we had to make the decision. The fuzzy barnacle rock was no longer so fuzzy, and this morning I caught Bob scraping more baby barnacles off another rock.

Then there were the pits and piles all over the sand bottom, coral bits mixed with the native sand. Incontrovertible evidence of Bob's nocturnal processing.

Bad Bob. Bad, bad Bob.

I mean, I get it. He's a large hermit crab. He needs to eat, and he needs to filter. Who am I to stop him from doing all those hermit crab things he does?

But he's just too big for this Aquarium. He needs a larger playground. So I picked him up, stowed him away in my carrying mug and drove him to the beach. Andres and I walked out some way into the sea, put him gently down onto the soft sandy seabottom and waved goodbye as he scuttered off into the open ocean.

He seemed really happy. I know how he feels. Being at a resort is great, but only for so long. There's nothing like the freedom of the wild.