Has anybody gone out to see the grunion running this year? We just got back from Coronado beach where we saw the flopping orgy in the sand. It was really pretty cool. It started with one or two fish flopping around then twenty yards down the beach there they were hundreds of the buggers flopping around digging into the sand.
The last grunion run I went on was in 1983. It was in Corona Del Mar, I think, and the beach was a shiny silver shimmering sea of thousands of fish, while kids and adults alike ran back and forth across the beach, pant legs rolled up, filling tin buckets with the slimy little creatures.
It was awesome.
Why on earth do they do that? Suicidal fish?
The Grunion are running
Today Today
The Grunion are running
hooray hooray
It’s a mating thing.
insert cynical joke here
I’ve always thought that it was just a joke they used on The Beverly Hillbillies. This is a real thing?
Thye actually mate on land, at the high tide line. And they taste good, too! Here is some info. Witnessing a grunion run is great fun, an almost unbelievable spectacle.
Yes grunnion are real. And you must catch them by hand with no net, gaff, scoop or any other implement. We used to have people come out on business from Raytheon in Lowell, MA who were convinced that a grunion hunt was like a snipe hunt. We had to find pictures, I believe from Life magazines nature books, of grunion up on the beach spawning and even then they weren’t certain the pictures weren’t fakes. Today with computer photo software they would be even more dubious about the pictures.
Hmph! Why don’t we have anything like that here!?! <sulks>
I met a very pretty Irish schoolteacher at a youth hostel in Florence, Italy. I told her I was from SoCal, and that we had fish that would swim up onto the beach, and you could just pick them up and put them in a bucket. Of course, it only happens when the tide is high and the moon is right… 
She didn’t believe me. 
Come on, people! Do I really appear to be someone who would make up tall stories?
I only went on one grunion run, when I was a kid in San Diego. I caught a few and put them into a bucket, and then I realised that someone would have to clean the suckers if we were going to eat them. Not that I have any problem with gutting fish, but it wasn’t a chore I wanted to do; so I let them go. There was a cat on the beach. I thought cats would love this bounty! But it seemed confused, and it didn’t eat any of them.
I have an old National Geographic that has an article about these interesting fish. My high school biology teacher’s photo is in it, since he knew the biologist who was the subect of the interview about the fish.
I’ve always wanted to eat a grunion. Well, it looks like I’m going back to SoCal. I’ll have to make it a point to go on a grunion run.
The only grunion run I went to was in 1964 but I fell asleep and missed it. 
I was only six but it still bugs me that I didn’t see it.