Attack of the Sea Salps

We had a glorious 4th of July--good beach time, excellent barbeque--complete with games run by the K brothers. For the record, we did not practice in advance or cheat, although it was curious that all prizes were won by the party host family!

Wiffle ball toss

Water balloon toss

Judges awarding the prizes

The beach surprised us once again with some interesting fauna: dolphins, a sea turtle and salps--lots of them! First the more familiar animals:

Eric spotted the dolphins about 50 yards off shore, moving southward and trailed by several boats. 

When I was growing up, we saw dolphins every year, although nostalgia may be coloring that memory. It was always exciting to spot them. They'd appear in August for a day when the water had warmed up. 

On the next day, a dead sea turtle about one foot long washed up on the waves--a big gash in its back, most likely from a propeller. A crowd quickly gathered and a few teenaged girls started to dig a hole to make a grave. A woman intervened and pointed out that the surf would wear away the grave, so she picked the turtle up and chucked him back into the waves. Didn't have time to get a picture and looking through some websites on Kemps Ridley turtles vs Green Sea turtles vs Atlantic Loggerheads, I realized my observational powers and my memory are pretty weak. Was the shell more round or heart shaped? What exactly was the coloring? Were there claws on the flippers? I have no idea--all I can say is I saw a turtle at the Jersey shore for the first time!

And the best for last: the invasion of the sea salps. The Record had featured a story about them covering Cape May beaches last Monday, a week before the holiday. (I'm sure that shore business owners were less than thrilled to read that front page headline: "Beaches invaded by slimy sea creatures") 


We've seen salps other years, but never knew what they were called. We thought the thumbnail sized bodies were part of the jelly fish family. Here's what they look like when they wash up on the shore: a sparkly necklace of jelly bean shapes.

They don't sting, but they are a bit slimy. You feel like you're swimming in tapioca pudding. They are actually tunicates, underwater saclike filter feeders. They process sea water through their bodies and feed on phytoplankton. They reproduce both asexually (cloning) and sexually, so that's how they're able to multiply so rapidly. We thought they might be more common in warm water, but the unusual 71 degree surf temps apparently had nothing to do with it. Salps occur in all temperatures of water from Antarctica to more temperate waters and chains or swarms of salps can cover miles of ocean surface.


They often follow the phytoplankton blooms in the ocean and some say they drift shoreward when they are looking for more food. The explanation I prefer, which seems more in keeping with the holiday, is that they overfeed and their tiny bodies get clogged with too much plankton. They sink and drift into the shore. Too much plankton is the salp equivalent of a weekend of too much pizza, sausage and peppers, hot dogs with sauerkraut, cheeseburgers, chips and ice cream. I hope the remaining salps learned the lesson of moderation and  communicated that to the rest of the swarm. "Abort, abort, too much food. Retreat to deeper waters." After all, summer's just begun and I'm planning on many more salp-free days at the shore.