Hip-hop sandhopper a wonderful sight

I WOULD love to put a stopwatch on a sandhopper, the half-inch long, pearly crustacean found foraging amongst the washed-up seaweed on our beaches. If one could harness the energy of the billions found amongst the sea wrack, one could fuel half the country’s JCBs.

From my observations I believe they must move at 60 miles an hour in their jumps and spend only a millisecond on the sand before they’re in the air again. This is when they’re panicked; normally, they simply run about and industriously devour dead seaweed. In doing so, they are most useful creatures, although holidaymakers may find them irritating when they hop into their bathing suits or sandwiches.

I imagine they can be eaten with impunity. They are crustaceans, after all. If marooned on a desert island, with limited supplies, I’d certainly try them. Boiled, I would imagine they would go pink, like miniature prawns. They would be crunchy to the bite, like the small shrimps the Spanish call ‘camarónes’.

As they forage among the tide wrack, they are, at a stretch of the imagination, like small, heavily armoured, eight-legged cows. Their pearly carapaces reflect the light and their many-jointed bodies are miracles of engineering. But for them, many beaches would become so piled with stinking wrack as to become unuseable. However, these days, there are not nearly enough of them to do the job. Holidaymakers and locals will know that green sea lettuce, fed on nutrients running off the land and thriving in the warming climate and warming seas, is a recent threat to the amenities of shallow bays and sheltered strands along our coasts. Boat propellers become fouled; bathers have to wade across a bank of dried, rotting vegetation to reach the sea. While, environmentally, Ulva lactuca does not seem to be a problem to the waders, gulls and ducks that feed on the mudbanks where it grows or lies, for humans it is unsightly and malodorous when it rots and forms great floating mattresses of weed, washing in and out with the tides.

Fresh, it is quite pleasant to swim through, a sort of free, natural thalassotherapy, and where it hangs suspended in the sea the water is warmer, perhaps because it absorbs the sun’s heat. Rich in nutrients and trace elements, it has been eaten in Ireland in the past and is highly valued in Caribbean, South America and Far Eastern cuisines. Clearly, sandhoppers appreciate it, and turn it into high-octane energy.

The inspiration for this article, if one could call it that, was watching carpets of panicked sandhoppers skip ahead of me down the wet, sloping sand to the sea as I strolled along a beach on which the sun had all but set, and the darkness was gathering. However, they are not sea creatures, and will drown if left in a jam jar of water, a piece of natural history trivia I learned as a child. When the sea is coming in, they leave their burrows in their millions and move up the beach ahead of it. So numerous are they, that they make a loud, hissing sound as they catapult in an almost knee-deep, golden spray along the sand.

But now, to move from the hip-hop energy of crustaceans on the sand to the slow, suspended waltz of big slugs mating. Please read on.

When we lived in a remote house above the Coomhola River on the Cork-Kerry borders, and kept a dog in the yard, large slugs would come at night and feed on the leavings in its dish. Once, we saw a pair mating and we were (deranged as it may seem) enthralled by the sight.

On warm nights from late May onward, slugs meet, and mate. In fact, they are hermaphroditic and can fertilise themselves, but mating with a partner must be more enjoyable because this is what they most often do, and each partner lays eggs after mating.

They meet on the ground and crawl around in a circle, nose to tail, for up to an hour. Then, one slug climbs the nearest vertical surface, followed closely by the other.

At some point favoured by both, they stop and wind around one another in a sinuous embrace. Now, a sticky mucus is exuded. This becomes a strong, silver thread via which, still entwined in their love-knot, they lower themselves and, hanging head downwards, mate in mid air. After mating, they disentangle. One climbs back up, while the other lowers itself, on a further extension of the thread, to the ground. Within a few weeks, pearly eggs, like sago, are laid by each under logs or stones, later hatching into tiny sluglets.