Grunion Are Running Ahead in Beach Battle

It’s a tacky-looking beach, littered with seaweed and cigarette butts, beer cans and the dead embers of many a bonfire. But, to Dr. Dan Pertschuk and to many generations of grunion, it’s home.

Whether the two opposing claimants to the 200-yard stretch of sand, formally known as Cardiff State Beach, can coexist peacefully is yet to be determined. And it is becoming very evident to the Cardiff physician that the grunion have a lot of state officials on their side.

Longtime residents of the Cardiff area have listened to beachgoers complain about the condition of Cardiff’s beach for decades, but they also have watched generations of grunion return to the Cardiff strand to spawn.

Pertschuk, surveying the messy beach with an amateur’s eye, planned to recruit a dozen or so helpers and clean it up. All it will take to turn it into a picture postcard beach, he reasoned, was a dedicated crew who would spend an hour or so early each Sunday morning gathering up the seaweed, raking under the debris and carting off the garbage.

“Now, if you are wearing a light-colored swimsuit, you can’t sit down there without getting dirty,” Pertschuk complained.

But, when he approached Bill Fait, supervisor of the North Coast’s state beaches, he found his beautification plans were not welcome. “We do not prohibit seaweed from being cleaned off beaches,” Fait conceded. “But we could not permit undue disturbance of the sand.”

State Fish and Game Department officials explained that the natural beach debris that looks so awful to Pertschuk is a protective covering for grunion and a source of sustenance to a hundred or so other sea creatures.

“If you remove the kelp, you would be breaking the food chain,” explained marine biologist John Duffy. The rotting vegetation is a necessary part of a balanced ecosystem, he said.

But to Pertschuk and other coastal residents, seaweed, by any name, still smells.

Fait’s concern over the beach cleanup, “is the typical reaction of a man who sits behind a desk and doesn’t take his family to the beach every weekend,” Pertschuk said.

The state park department’s budget is not fat enough to provide for regular beach-cleaning crews in San Diego County, Fait said. “We would welcome some volunteer help as long as we are satisfied that it is being done in a manner which will not have harmful effects.”

Duffy, conceding that there is a middle ground in which human and grunion can coexist on the beach, suggested that Pertschuk pick up the seaweed rather than rake it off, so as not to disturb the sand unnecessarily. He also suggested the use of light leaf rakes to police up the surface of the sand. That would not disturb the grunion eggs lying 4 to 6 inches beneath the surface.

If the kelp is raked off with heavy rakes or mechanical equipment, Duffy predicted, the grunion eggs beneath the surface will be exposed and destroyed.

Grunion, Duffy said, visit the county’s sandy beaches when the highest tides occur--every two weeks at the full of the moon and at the new moon. The female, standing on her tail, bores a hole into the sand at the high tide line, deposits her eggs and swims away on the next surge of surf.

The eggs mature in their sandy nests and hatch two weeks later when the high, high tide returns. The fry swim away on the high tide to mature at sea and to return later to begin a new generation.

Pertschuk, who has lived in the area four years, says he has never seen the beach silver with spawning grunion but he is tired of seeing it black with the debris from beach fires and dried seaweed. He says he is determined to remedy the latter situation without disturbing the former.

When his volunteer crew, which now numbers six, swells to 12 or 15, Pertschuk plans to hit the Cardiff State Beach and make it presentable.

Duffy points out that state fish and game laws are written in language which spells out what is allowed. If an action is not specified as legal, it is illegal, he said.

There is, in essence, an unwritten law protecting the grunion from those members of the human species who would clean their spawning ground, Duffy said.