Death Comes to the Beach

Of Barnacles and Squid, Life and Death, and Curious Means of Birth

My wife and I went out to the Pacific Coast for the weekend and, not surprisingly, had a few splendid natural history encounters. But before I get to those stories, I have to write that my proudest nature moment was saving the life of a small bird. On Tuesday morning, I heard a curious fluttering/knocking sort-of sound outside. When I opened the door, it stopped so I returned to my coffee. Then it began again, not with a consistent rhythm but regularly: a flurry of sound, stop for two or three seconds, a flurry of sound, etc. This time I snuck to the front door. The sound persisted, I opened the door, and it continued. The flutter was coming from a drainage pipe descending from our gutter. At first I thought some sort of dripping but that didn’t make sense as it hadn't rained in days.

Fortunately, the downspout was very easy to disassemble. When I did so, a Dark Eyed Junco appeared, looked around, and flew away. Made my day; I hope it made the little bird’s day, too.

But back to the ocean. Walking along the wrack line at Copalis Beach, I found what looked like clusters of three-inch-long opalescent fingers. There were dozens of these accumulations, each with dozens of fingers. Within each finger, which was rubbery and smooth, were white dots, about half the size of a lentil. They were egg sacs, or capsules, most likely of the Opalescent Squid, Doryteuthis opalescens. (You will also see them listed as Loligo opalescens.)

Found from southeast Alaska to the tip of Baja California, opalescent squid live on the continental shelf and head closer to shore to spawn. Biologists refer to these squid as terminal spawners, since most die after spawning, though they can spawn multiple times within their season of procreation. Each female produces about 20 capsules, which she attaches to the substrate, each filled with about 200 eggs in a gelatinous mass. Curiously, biologists have found that once a suitable site has been found, it stimulates males to remain and spawn—called “hot spot” lekking—often resulting in great accumulations of capsule mounds the length of a soccer pitch.

The reason I saw the egg clusters was that some disturbance, such as waves, an animal, or trawling/dredging, had detached them from the depths and currents had carried them ashore, says Scarlett Arbuckle, a marine biologist at Oregon State University. Sadly, she says most will die soon, if they haven’t already. The eggs don’t do well out of water or in warm temperatures. I didn’t see anyone eating them but Scarlett suggested that birds, crabs, and seals might. Other predators of opalescent squid include humpback whale, lingcod, Bald Eagle, Caspian Tern, Rhinoceros Auklet (33 to 85% of diet), other squid species, other D. opalescens (which means cannibalism), and sea stars.

Later that day and about seven miles north, I found another unusual animal, attached to driftwood. Hundreds of one-inch-wide triangular, bluish gray shells dangled from thin, flexible tan ribbons, or what looked like ribbons. They covered almost the entire ten-foot-long log. Turns out they were pelagic gooseneck barnacles (Lepas anatifera), an animal that, like the squid eggs, are not found on shore unless they are dead or soon to be. Born out at sea, the baby barnacles attach themselves, apparently en masse, to other marine objects, such as logs, crocodiles, kelp, ships, and at least one human corpse (but that’s another story), and ride the currents, free as can be. An animal with such a lifestyle, of living on the surface of another organism, is known as an epibiont, and with such a mode of travel, is called a cosmopolitan epipelagic rafter.

Log with pelagic gooseneck barnacles and upclose of the barnacles.

Gooseneck barnacles are sometimes called goose barnacles, which should not be confused with a barnacle goose, though back in the day some people thought they were related. As early as the 12th century, people proposed that barnacle geese developed from barnacles, which had originally grown on trees that apparently then fell into the sea. One of the last to cotton to this arborortus idea was Sir Robert Moray, who wrote in 1678 in the august Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: “This bird in every Shell that I opened, as the least and the biggest, I found so curiously and completely formed, that there appeared nothing wanting, as to external parts, for making up a perfect Sea-Fowl.” By the way, the barnacles’ scientific name, Lepas anatifera, means duck-bearing limpet (or shellfish).

When I asked my good friend, the marine biologist and punnist Dave Secord, about these critters he made an excellent observation addressing the juxtaposition of mobility of the barnacle and the squid eggs. On one hand you have squid eggs, which are normally anchored to the substrate, and yet are the product of a “famously speedy invertebrate.” On the other, you have the very mobile gooseneck barnacles (at least in a floating and hitchhiking sense) of a “famously stuck down kind of animal.” And then we also have their final resting place, the beach, and the juxtaposition that I was able to encounter these fascinating animals only because they died and washed ashore.

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Two book related tidbits that I am tickled and proud to share.

• Homewaters is now available as an audio book. It’s my first! I have two free audiobooks available for the first two people who get a new paid subscription to my newsletter.

• Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales won a Silver Medal in the 2023 INDIES Regional book category.