The Saltwater Diaries: 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....