woody with a view - 4-18-2005 at 06:11 PM
living in san diego we rarely (like 2-3 seasons) see these little guys washing up on our coast. the foto is on the pacific side of the san quintin
peninsula 20 years ago (back before carona made the big time, and my pallete was less discriminating
!!!).
they seem to ride the warm water currents from the south (el nino?) during the summer but i have only seen them 2-3 times, and have been to BCS dozens
of times so was wondering where they come from.
[Edited on 4-19-2005 by woody in ob]
[Edited on 4-19-2005 by woody in ob]
pelagic red crabs
yankeeirishman - 4-18-2005 at 06:50 PM
They are normally a marker of El Ni?o conditions
PacO - 4-19-2005 at 10:38 AM
Actually they've washed up on the beach the last 3 years here. This seems to be more and more consistant recently. I first started seeing them about
1992 ( since that is when I moved to OB ) and fairly regularly since then.
Bruce R Leech - 4-19-2005 at 10:41 AM
call the Serra club. they will come to rescue theme.
Slightly off topic
DanO - 4-19-2005 at 10:53 AM
Any time I see anything dead washed up on the beach, I can't help but think of that incident in Oregon a few years ago involving a beached whale. To
remove the carcass, the local city engineers came up with the brilliant idea of tunnelling under the carcass to place explosives, which they figured
would blow the whale to seaward in small bits that would be cleaned up by the thousands of gulls that had gathered around to pick at it. Problem was
that the whale didn't cooperate. Most of the carcass stayed put, and the parts that did blow up were pretty big and went everywhere (one crushed the
roof of a car in the beach parking lot). And the explosion scared off all the gulls, so the highly intelligent humans had to clean it all up
themselves, piece by piece. Funniest video I've ever seen. Anyone have a link?
El Jefe - 4-19-2005 at 11:18 AM
About ten years ago a group of us were down in the San Quinten area and decided to drive out to the tip of the peninsula. We took my buddy Mark's
trooper (really his wife's car) since it had 4WD. Out the road we went. There is one long stretch where the road is the beach, so he put it into four
wheel and we proceeded ahead, only to find the beach covered with crabs like the ones pictured above. We had great fun crunching through a few miles
of the little dead guys.
All was well until a few days later when Mark got home with the Trooper. The morning after he got home his wife woke him up to ask him what was the
horrible smell in the garage. You can guess what the problem was. Thousands of bits and pieces of little red crabs were stuck all over the bottom of
her car, stinking to high heaven. Needless to say, he didn't get to take his wife's car out much after that.
Anonymous - 4-19-2005 at 11:23 AM
Oh yeah!
http://www.perp.com/whale/
DanO - 4-19-2005 at 11:58 AM
YESSSSS! I hadn't realized that the exploding whale incident happened all the way back in 1970. It's the website that was created a few years ago.
Isn't the internet wonderful?
explosive
yankeeirishman - 4-19-2005 at 01:30 PM
Chunko the Whale! That was a great video! Will worth the few minutes it took to load up.
lizard lips - 4-20-2005 at 02:40 PM
GREAT VIDEO!!!!
Anonymous - 4-24-2005 at 11:22 AM
was P.E.T.A around back then??
Pompano - 4-24-2005 at 12:53 PM
the locals here call them 'langostinas'. We had about a billion of them on all the beaches here in Conception back in '88. Whew...what a smell!
They were 4 feet wide and 4 inches thick...long red bands of them everywhere. The 'Calypso' came in to investigate, but determined nothing. Not even
the gulls would eat the dead crabs. Took a while to go away.