Sea Slugs

      Going for a walk on the beach with my husband is always an educational experience. I usually get some sort of biology lesson about anything laying around. Dead stuff usually attracts him and I get to hear all about whatever it is that has suffered it's unfortunate demise. Seaweed, shells, jellyfish, and sometimes dead fish. Last week it was a porcupine fish, strange looking pile of wiggly jelly with what looked like a hedge hog fur covered in goo.

Things I have learn from my Marine Biologist husband:
      Seaweed is an enemy of coral reefs, it's overgrowth kills the coral.
      Parrot fish are a reefs best friend because they eat the seaweed, they also shit sand. Go figure.
      Octopus drill in as suck out snails from their shells.
      Pooka means 'hole' hence the term pooka shell.
      and on and on and on..........

       He also save creatures on the beach that have washed up and are drowning in the air.
There is one creature that is always stranded on our local hawaiian beach, it looks like slug. Really, like a huge slug that you find in the forest. Side note: I remember my best friend and I actually caught a slug once and decided to see if we could kill it, then we put it in a box and we were going to give it to a girl we didn't like...ya, I actually did that. I won't tell you her name, I would not want to rat her out. She actually stuck pins in it. Poor slug, stupid middle school girls. Wow, I could have been considered a 'mean girl'. Anyway, about the sea slugs. He calls them Sea Hairs but they look like slugs to me. Whenever we find one laying all gooey and still on the beach, it's a slug so it really can't move, he picks it up, yuck, and throws it back in the ocean. Then tells me this story:
      "One time I saw a picture on the wall, a comic strip of sorts. It was a picture of a guy throwing sea stars back into the water that had washed up on the beach. The guy next to the one throwing the stars said to him 'why are you doing that? It won't make a difference!' and the guy throwing them picked up another sea star and threw it into the ocean and said 'It did to that one!'
      What can I say, Mark is a really good guy. He saves any and all of the creatures he can.
Last week he was out of town and I was walking alone on the beach when I came upon a slug. What to do? Up to this point I let him do all the saving and hadn't expected to be in this situation, I walked past it, thinking, "I am not picking that thing up." Then the guilt set in and I remembered the story. I turned around and went back to it, scooped way under it into the sand so I didn't have to touch it, then threw it as hard as I could into the sea..."It did to that one"...I could hear Mark saying in my head as I continued down the beach.