I took Judy on her first Grunion Hunt fifty years ago in Southern California. We went to the beach late at night and walked along the shore. Waves washed in, receded, in again. Nothing but the unchanging rhythm of the waves. Then, from one wave, with no warning, the sand was covered with glistening flashing silver. Thousands of silverside baitfish, burrowing with their tails into the semi-fluid wave-washed sand. The females come ashore at (almost) predictable times in spring and summer, during the full moon or new moon, at high tide, to lay their eggs as high up in the sand as they can. The males join them to fertilize the eggs and they all wash back into the ocean on the next wave. The spawning lasts about four hours on four consecutive days, then they’re gone. A couple weeks later, the egg hatch corresponds to another high tide and out swims another generation of Grunion.
It’s fun to go on a Grunion Hunt, not to catch them with your hands, which is the only legal way to take them, but just to watch. It’s an amazing life-cycle, but Judy was even more amazed. “What’s that?” she exclaimed. I told her the wriggling mass on the beach were Grunion. “Grunion? I didn’t know there was really any such thing as Grunion!” She said.
She was humoring me. She thought we were on another Snipe Hunt. She thought a Grunion Hunt was just another excuse to go out on the beach in the dark and make out.
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