The Critters in Redondo Won’t Meet Similar Fate

When Redondo Beach empties two park ponds as part of a reconstruction project, John Oliver will make sure that a large population of marine life doesn’t go down the drain.

Oliver, Redondo Beach’s city clerk, and about 40 other users of Hopkins Wilderness Park plan to save the ponds’ critters by placing them in a large wading pool until workers have finished putting in new cement bottoms.

“Instead of pulling the plug on them and killing them, we’re going to save them,” said Oliver, who is a member of the Friends of the Wilderness Park organization. “Our No. 1 concern is to save the animals. You hate to see anything like that die.”

Crayfish, mosquito fish, frogs, turtles, salamanders and even fresh-water shrimp are believed to inhabit the two ponds.

Oliver said they hope a company will donate a large wading pool or sell one for about $300.

“It’s got to be rigged up where we can keep people from terrorizing them,” Oliver said about the animals.

The 11-acre park at Knob Hill Avenue and Camino Real is valued by Redondo Beach officials for its camping and nature study facilities among trees, meadows, streams and ponds.

The federal government, which had used the site for the Nike missile radar-tracking system, gave Redondo Beach title to the area in 1971. The site originally was part of the El Segundo sand hills, which extend about 12 miles from Playa del Rey to the Palos Verdes Hills.

In 1975, the city planted about 1,000 trees, including eucalyptus, sycamore, gumwood, pine, ash, elm and California redwood.

Clogged by Mud

Pumps were installed to feed water into two streams that flow into the ponds, which were built with a sand and porous clay bottom. Since then, mud has collected on the bottom and has blocked inlets. When the water is drained, the mud will be scraped out and workers will build concrete bottoms.

Oliver said construction, which was to have begun about two years ago, was delayed by budget problems. The animals were to have been transferred to another body of water.

Those plans were scrapped when it was found that many of the animals could be carrying spores from duckweed, a lime-green plant that spreads across the water surface. But officials feared that the duckweed would be spread throughout another body of water.

“It’s kind of a Catch-22,” Oliver said. “If you want to kill the weed, you have to kill the animal.”

So the organization has proposed putting the animals in the wading pool.

Weeds Cover Water

On the park’s largest pond, called Green Swamp, the duckweed has spread so much that signs were put up to warn visitors, especially children, not to try to walk on the water, said Bob Atkinson, the city’s director of parks and recreation. But he said that the weed is more of a nuisance than a harm to wildlife.

At Manhattan Beach’s Polliwog Park, much of the marine life was lost when the city started construction on a pond about three weeks ago to improve its water quality. But Oliver stressed that the Polliwog pond is much bigger. Users of Hopkins Park, he said, also had time to mobilize an effort to save the animals.

“We have a real active community here,” Oliver said. “It’s too bad that they couldn’t get something going on it.”