Thursday, May 15, 2014

grunion greeting, 2014 #2

 fish p0rn
female grunion dug in sand and laying eggs
while male releases cloudy milt around her head

unusually small male, others were lethargic

grunion greeting

We try to arrive about 1/2 hour before high tide, because our experience has been if the grunion are going to run, they will usually have already started.  We also know that if we spot a black-crowned night heron (aka Charlie) on the beach as we pull up on the pier, there will be grunion.  This held true for both Wednesday (no blog post) and Thursday nights.  If there isn't too much human interference, we noticed the Charlies seem to know when the grunion are done and fly away. 

I submitted both night's reports to Dr. Martin through her online form and sent her an e-mail per her request because grunion sightings in Monterey are not common.  She invited me as her guest to the first Ocean Science Trust conference held at Asilomar last month.  The various perspectives on crunchable Citizen Science were extremely helpful to me as I embark on my own project.  Thank you, Dr. Martin!

I'm reformatting my typical grunion greeting blog posts, now 5 years after we began.  Man, I can't believe we've been doing this so long... okay, we did skip a year, because we got so discouraged from too many late nights with no grunion sightings.  I hope to add better information this year, although reading back through our experiences has been fun.
  
05/14/14 full moon 12:18pm
05/14/14 high tide 10:42pm 5.8 ft
beaches: Municipal
Charlies: 4 + 1 western gull
others: Chris Tenney, Dr. Matsumoto & friends, Steve the Fisherman
my observation time: 10:15pm - 11:45pm
W-1, 25-50 already running on arrival
 
beaches: Municipal, San Carlos, Asilomar
Charlies: 5 + 1 western gull
others: J, Steve the Fisherman, Dr. Guacamole & crew
my observation time: 10:45pm - 12:15am
W-2, 100's already running on arrival

3 comments:

Imperfect and Tense said...

Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs! (This is actually quite tricky, as we live in a bungalow) I had to look up 'milt'. What a sheltered and landlocked life I've led :o)

Katie (Nature ID) said...

Honestly, Graeme, I didn't know any of this until participating in this project. Thanks for pointing things out, because I edited the above with additional links to hopefully make things clearer.

Imperfect and Tense said...

Many thanks, Katie. Natural History is fantastic, there's always something to learn :o)