June 17, 2015

Report Details

The good news as you already know is that the sea stars are in fact back at Roads End. One person told me today me today she thought they must have been hiding under the sand, else how could there be so many adult ones back in such short time since they all seemed to have died out? The bad news is that they are back and they aren't hiding under the sand, or wherever they were and that people are collecting them again...Hopefully just the dead ones but knowing that is probably not the case. One lady who said she had just gotten a beach house here some six months ago was instructing five little children about the tidepool animals. She was sharing her knowledge with me as well. As they collected a bag of sea stars and crabs that were gone. She said you could tell they were dead because their tube feet were all up inside and not reaching out as they would if they were alive. She told me that you can touch one living sea star only but never two because if you touch more than one they would die. She also told me that they had counted 300 sea stars at low tide.She said she had confronted someone who was taking live animals; I think she said crabs and snails but that they did it anyway...She told me how they preserve the stars they collect. Putting them in outdoor cages to protect them from seagulls ..etc/..and when they are ready they spray them with lacquer.One local walking his dog and looking for interesting rocks and agates reported that a guy with a backpack just going by us bragged he had just collected some seventy pounds of rocks. He assumed it couldn't have weighed that much but was concerned about how much one person was taking. He told me his own philosophy: If you don't take it someone else will so take it.He also said he heard on the news that all the mussels and shellfish have some horrible toxin now that if you eat one you will probably die...and that a friend of his in the past had eaten an infected one and got terribly ill from it. Mussels are in my opinion blessed by God in that they aren't very pretty and have the reputation and power to instill the fear of taking them in people or they will be forced to hide somewhere too.Yesterday I went to the beach at a much higher tide. Way above the water in the dry sand I found a live purple sea urchin- which are pretty much gone from Roads End. I haven't seen but one other one in many years. Anyway I couldn't get out to the tidepools because the water was too high and I didn't know what I could do. I put him in a small niche in the splash zone rocks that had some water in it and that was I thought out of the range of vision so no one would get him and vowed to come back first thing in the morning to get him and put him way back out in the tidepools. Alas at 8:30 a.m. the beach was already full of people and he was gone..I can only pray that he made it out when the tide came all the way up; but strongly bet he is in someone's collecting bag today with a bunch of his other friends and relatives.