Natural Perspectives -- Vic Leipzig and Lou Murray

Vic Leipzig and Lou Murray

The rain last week brought the usual mixed blessing to the Bolsa

Chica. Fresh water helps the dune and salt marsh plants grow. It brings

nutrients to the wetlands and flushes salt from the salt flats.

But rain also brings trash and debris to the wetlands. Fortunately,

the county now has booms strung across the Wintersburg flood control

channel. These booms hold back the bulk of the trash that rain washes

into the storm drains and down the flood control channels. A crew was

hard at work last week fishing out the inevitable empty motor oil

containers, tennis balls and Styrofoam cups. They pulled piles of lumber

out of the channel, and even some furniture, filling dump trucks with

trash that otherwise would have gone into the wetlands and Huntington

Harbour. They pull out the solid trash, but not dissolved pollutants.

Those wash right into the wetlands, through the harbor and out to sea.

Sadly, not even all of the trash is contained by the booms, although

it’s a big improvement over the situation a decade ago, before booms were

installed. After the storm last week, plastic bags and other trash

floated in the water of Inner Bolsa Bay. While the county has cleanup

crews patrolling the flood control channels, the Department of Fish and

Game has no one to remove trash from the Ecological Reserve. Various

volunteer groups pick up trash periodically. Unfortunately, the wind and

rain seem to bring discarded material into the wetlands as fast as

volunteers can pick it up.

Fortunately, there is more to see in the water than the debris of

civilization. The underwater world of the Inner Bolsa is ignored by most,

but if you know what to look for, there is a world worth watching beneath

the surface. We enjoy the changing underwater landscape of the rocky

intertidal zone near the tidegates. Mussels, limpets and snails live

there. Hundreds of yellow sponges, some nearly a foot in diameter, dot

the rocks. The first moon jellies of the season are in the bay now,

moving gently with the current.

We also spotted three sea hares last week. These fat marine slugs come

in various shades of blond and brown decorated with black and white

spots. They grow to about eight inches in a matter of months. They have

appendages on their front end that look a bit like rabbit ears, hence the

name sea hare. These gentle creatures crawl about the ocean bottom in

search of tasty algae. Like their relatives the squid and octopus, they

squirt purple ink if they’re disturbed. Soon sea hares will be plentiful

and easily observed near the shore by the tide gates and under the walk

bridge.

Like most mollusks, sea hares are hermaphrodites, meaning that any

given individual is both male and female. When they mate, they form

circles of up to a dozen animals, each one playing the role of male and

female at the same time. They lay eggs in clusters that look like wads of

vermicelli in colors that vary from yellow to cream to gray to greenish.

Although the egg clusters of sea hares are highly toxic, the larvae that

hatch from the eggs are eminently edible and make up an important

component of the plankton that forms the bottom of the food chain in

Bolsa Bay.

Probably the most colorful marine invertebrate found by the tide gates

is the Navanax, a close relative of the sea hare. This slim

cannoli-shaped slug grows to about five inches long and has iridescent

blue and yellow stripes and white spots on a dark brown body. The Navanax

is a predatory slug, hunting down bubble snails and gobbling them up as

fast as it can. Still, they don’t exactly zip along. They are slugs,

after all.

Another invertebrate that lives near the tide gates is the

ring-spotted dorid. This four-inch long bumpy blob is a member of the

nudibranch family. Dorids look like flattened Twinkies with ruffled

edges. They sport branching purple antennae at one end, with brown

ring-shaped spots on cream-colored backs. We spied a dorid laying its

yellow, spiraling egg cluster on the rocks near the sponges this weekend.

Dorids are usually seen around the sponges because that’s what they eat.

These interesting animals live mostly unnoticed lives at the Bolsa

Chica, eating and being eaten. Some of them die when winter rains wash

toxics down the flood control channel, but most survive. These marine

invertebrates will find and colonize the back Bolsa when it is restored,

as they have the Inner Bolsa. When they do, they’ll find it an

improvement over their present habitat. The area to be restored will not

be contaminated by urban runoff like the Inner Bolsa, because the new

wetlands will not connect to any flood control channels.

Soon the waters will warm, the algae will grow lush and green, and the

annual cycle of renewal, hatching and birth will go on at the Bolsa

Chica, as it has for millennia. Next time you walk around the wetlands,

look down into the water. You might be surprised by what you see.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at o7 [email protected] .