Pescadero Memories

(Photo: gooseneck barnacles, courtesy John Vonderlin.)

Hi June,
There was one unusual “I See Dead Things” cluster at Invisible Beach that only appeared once, but has left me hoping for its return. Though, instead of being a cluster of a number of the same things, it was a cluster of different things I had never or rarely seen before. Some of the things I have never been able to discover what they were, others I now know what they are and have seen minor clusters of them at Invisible Beach since then. Why they all showed up that day is still a mystery I’d like to solve.
The photo above shows a group of Gooseneck Barnacles. Thank you Wikipedia for the following:
“In the days before it was realised that birds migrate, it was thought that Barnacle Geese, Branta leucopsis, developed from this crustacean, since they were never seen to nest in temperate Europe, hence the scientific and English names. The confusion was prompted by the similarities in colour and shape. Because they were often found on driftwood, it was assumed that the barnacles were attached to branches before they fell in the water. The Welsh monk Giraldus Cambrensis claimed to have seen goose barnacles in the process of turning into barnacle geese in the twelfth century.”
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Hi June,

As I began regularly collecting the marine debris that was spit out by Neptune’s Vomitorium, onto Invisible Beach, I couldn’t help but note that often there would be clusters of certain types of debris. Knowing that moving water frequently does that because of the interactions of the water flow and the object’s density, surface area, and shape, I wasn’t too amazed at first.

After all, the clustering of objects on beaches is perfectly normal.

The typical clustering effect that’s visible on the average beach is characterized by the size of the sediment composing different parts of the beach; fine sand here, a gravel bank of similar-sized pebbles there, or a bed of larger cobbles over there; making you aware of its noisy presence every time a sizeable wave recedes.

Another less common, and slightly more mysterious clustering effect of beach sediment, that you can see occasionally where the waves reach a cliff, a bluff or a dune, manifests itself as black chevrons pointing seaward. These chevrons are usually composed of fine, but heavy particles of magnetite, moved into their characteristic shape by the myriad of forces working in the swash zone. They are called heavy mineral laminae and have been researched quite extensively.

Invisible Beach displays all of those rock related clusters as well as the gravel bed at Neptune’s Vomitorium that contains all the varieties of quartz I have mentioned previously.. But, it also frequently displays clusters of expired critters whose pictures I put into a folder I call, “I See Dead Things.”

The most common dead-things-cluster at Invisible Beach is one most beach walkers are probably familiar with, a great number of mollusk shells of the same type dog-piling together as pictured in the photo at the top of this story.

It also occasionally displays the more tragically poignant clusters of freshly dead sea stars, seemingly saying good-bye to each other as pictured below.

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