Donna Kalez was out for a leisurely stroll Sunday morning on the Dana Point headlands when she turned a corner and saw the beach below covered in bright red.
Thousands of mini crabs – which look like tiny lobsters or crawfish – created a rim of red along the shoreline, scattered and scrambling along the sand at Strands Beach, Salt Creek, San Clemente, south Laguna, Newport Beach and Huntington Beach.
“They are all still alive. They are in the surfline and swimming up,” Kalez said. “Once they get this close to shore, they can’t go anywhere, so they just wash in. They aren’t strong enough to swim out.”
The tiny crustaceans have been making news in recent weeks after washing up in masses on San Diego County beaches. They’ve been spotted sporadically in Orange County in recent days as far north as Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, but Sunday they washed up here in the thousands.
The Pleuroncodes planipes, also known as pelagic red crabs or tuna crabs, showed up in early January and again in February on Balboa Island, fascinating marine scientists and beachgoers, some who tried to save the still-live critters by throwing them back to the sea, though most were dead.
Experts said the crabs – which are about 1 to 3 inches long, too small to make for good eating – haven’t been seen in the area for decades. It’s the warm water that has brought them here; they normally live in Baja California.
The pelagic crabs are the latest in a year of odd sightings along the coast, with experts crediting warm water that has lingered off Southern California for the past year.
In recent weeks, blue, jellyfish-like creatures known as “by-the-wind sailors” have been spotted, and tropical fish like yellowtail and bluefin tuna are showing up earlier than normal this year.
The warm patch – extending from the Bering Sea to the waters off Southern California and showing up as a red splotch on temperature-reading water maps – has been named “The Blob” by scientists.
O.C. Lifeguards Chief Jason Young said his staff is asking beachgoers to not touch or take them from the marine protected areas of Dana Point and Laguna Beach, and is educating curious people about what the critters are all about.
Though a big surf contest was happening at Salt Creek through the weekend, there were no complaints of people getting pinched by the critters, he said.
“They have pinchers, but they mostly swim backward,” he said. “They sort of bump you along the way.”
Young said he remembers last seeing the crabs around the same time as the last big El Niño in 1997. He said lifeguards in north Orange County said they were seeing some on the sand, but not in the masses as seen in south Laguna.
“There’s enough that it looks like a big red blanket along the water line at Thousand Steps Beach and Three Arch Bay,” he said.
Rocky Neidhardt, chef at The Shack on San Clemente Pier, said it looked like “millions” of the crabs were in the water, with more along the beaches.
“They move like squid in the water and like crabs on shore,” Neidhardt said.
Kalez, general manager of Dana Wharf Sportfishing, said her boat captains had been seeing the critters in the ocean for weeks and knew it was only a matter of time before they washed up onshore.
“I think it’s kind of cool,” she said. “It’s a phenomenon you won’t see for a long time. It’s sad they’re going to die, but there’s nothing you can do.”
For beachgoers, it was an odd sight to see.
“Everyone is taking selfies with the red crab,” Kalez said.
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