Tide Pooling Log: Pre-Dawn Summer Low Tide in Orange County
Pre-dawn summer low tides are some of the best of the year in Southern California. You can avoid the crowds and the heat while getting the warm water summer species during an excellent low tide.
I took advantage of several of the low tides in June this year. Check out this article from my trip to Ventura County if you missed it. That same week, I got up pre-dawn again, but this time at an old haunt in Orange County.
I got to the beach around 4:45; I was meeting up with several other tidepoolers. It was still pitch dark, a little chilly, and drizzling slightly. Tide pooling in the dark is vastly different from visiting during the day, both in good ways and bad. This article details many safety tips that can keep your adventure from turning into a disaster. But all of us brought our headlamps, appropriate shoes, and other equipment, so we were good to go.
We hadn’t been on the rocks five minutes before we started seeing nudibranchs. They were everywhere! Many species, even the ones you see during the day, are primarily nocturnal and they were out in full force tonight. Of course, because there were about five of us looking, we saw much more than any of us would have seen on our own. After a while, we stopped calling out common species since they were so abundant. The gallery has some of my favorite shots and includes many of the species we saw.
The San Diego dorids (Diaulula sandiegensis), were particularly fun as they look like fuzzy little sea bunnies if you get the focus just right. Of course, there were dozens of opalescent nudibranchs (Hermissenda opalescens) and a fair amount of white spotted sea goddesses (Doriopsilla albopunctata) and three-lined aeolids (Coryphella trilineata).
I found — or was there when someone else found — four new-to-me nudibranch species this morning. First, I found a colorful dirona (Dirona picta) while it was still dark. While this species can be rather colorful, most individuals in our area are cream/white or nearly transparent. I assume the difference comes from diet.
A friend found a Branched Dendronotid (Dendronotus venustus), which was also a lifer species for me. Only a few millimeters long, this species is one of the hardest to spot as its cerata shape and coloration often match the algae.
The tiniest of all today was a green balloon aeolid (Eubranchus olivaceus), small enough that after putting it in a large bowl to take photos, one of the tide poolers with me said they didn’t see a slug at all, but just a floaty in the water. They had simply missed the slug entirely. I should add that for several of the small slugs, if they were on a rock, we placed the rock in a bowl or other container to observe them before returning them to where we found them. This way we are sure not the lose the animal and to not fall into the water while taking photos.
Perhaps the rarest nudibranch of the day was this Tanya’s dorid (Doris tanya) I found in a pool with more than ten other slugs. It was huge, for a nudibranch, about two inches long. Southern California is the very northern tip of this species range, usually only seen here during the summer, and there had only been about 35 observations of the species on iNaturalist before we found this one. These “studio” looking shots while the nudibranch was on a piece of dark kelp, lending itself to a dark background while using a flash. We all took some glamor shots of this unusual animal.
Occasionally, tidepoolers will see a number of the same species all in a single pool, but nowhere else in the intertidal. Such as the case with the flatworms Hoploplana californica, another new to new species without a common name. They are rather cryptic and resemble corambes with rhinophores and a bryozoan-looking pattern. But as flatworms, they move quicker by beating tiny hair-like cilia on their undersides instead of the muscly foot of nudibranchs. There were about seven in a single small pool and we watched them for a while before moving on.
This reef finspot (Paraclinus integripinnis) was a treat for me to see, another new species. This intertidal blenny has a very small range, along the Pacific coast of Baja and the Southern California Bight.
While most of us were interested mostly in the nudibranchs this morning, I did spy a juvenile yellow rock crab (Metacarcinus anthonyi) with intricate coloration and another juvy rock crab that I can’t get a definite ID on.
One of our group found a rather unusual species for this location, an Enteromorpha-eating sapsucker (Aplysiopsis enteromorphae). Pardon the less-than-great photo; it was only a few millimeters long and the colors made it difficult to focus on. Known from Alaska to Mexico, this slug is not a nudibranch but a sap-sucking slug that feeds on plants instead of preying on other animals. You often feed these kinds of animals near their food source, in this case, a few varieties of sea lettuce, but there didn’t seem to be any present.
Some of the cutest creatures we saw today were a couple of baby octopuses that couldn’t have been more than a day or two old. An adult must have laid eggs at this beach, as we saw two close to one another and more on other days. Their arms were still small in proportion to their heads and they were very good photography subjects, sitting still for us. The individual in the image above would have comfortably fit on a nickel. This is most likely a lesser two-spot octopus hatching (Octopus bimaculoides), but it’s difficult to be sure.
On the less cute end of the spectrum were the sea spiders, incredibly hard to spot and even harder to photograph. I believe the animal pictured here is a Hilgendorf’s sea spider (Ammothea hilgendorfi) but am not entirely confident about the identification. Because of their thin legs and tiny bodies, even macro cameras like the TG-6 have a hard time focusing on them, but I was finally able to get a couple of good shots.
Of course, all the typical intertidal creatures were about: hermit crabs, chitons, a couple of sea stars, limpets, etc. The striped shore crabs were out in full force, hunting and foraging near dawn. This one got a hold of a chiton and was by no means going to stick around for me to take this photo. I just snapped this shot while he was scurrying off somewhere safe to enjoy his meal.
Despite the persistent June clouds, it was fully light by around 7 am when we turned our headlamps off. Some of our group began to leave, but the few of us that stayed were treated to a huge spotted dorid (about two inches, huge is relative), in the mid-intertidal. The tide had been coming in for nearly our entire trip, but it was now beginning to cover some of our favorite pools.
As I was making my way through the mid to high intertidal on my way out, I wanted to see what might be under some small rocks and got lucky with a Hylocelis californica, another resident flatworm, sometimes called the California flatworm. These animals are known for living high in the intertidal under rocks, sometimes out of the water entirely. This one was in a small pool and let me take a few photos before stretching out and floating away from the light.
As I drove home, I realized it was only about 7:45 in the morning. The things you can do and see when you get up early.
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