Sea life — and death

It’s getting a little Nat Geo up in here.

Máncora, known locally for its seafood catches, diverse sea life, and temperate weather is becoming known to the two of us as a place with plenty of tide pools, where we can go beach combing for sea shells, smoothed stones, and—sadly—diverse and consistent washed up sea life.

We’re technically on Las Pocitas beach, a few kilometers and a 15-minute mototaxi ride south of Máncora proper. While we’ve found countless amazing seashells, ranging from the size of my pinky toenail to bigger than my two outstretched hands, every day that we walk along the shore we also find dead creatures from the sea.

Sometimes death is fresh, clear, and glassy-eyed. When it’s not, it’s dark eye sockets, flies, a swarm of crabs scurrying to and fro, and occasionally, condors overhead, the rotting perfume pulling them closer.

Among the flat, glimmeringly silver and eel-like fish and red snappers, mouths agape, our most startling find yesterday was a belly-up sea turtle, a red thread of its entrails pecked and dragged away by hungry vultures.

Pufferfish seem like a regular casualty of the area; we’ve seen one almost every day. They’re mostly small and triangular, with their wide set eyes and flat forehead indicators of their species, though we’ve also stumble upon a spiky one that was at full puff capacity.

It could be the terrain. The very currents that bring together the warm and cold water allowing such a wide variety of animals to make a home here could also be a force some cannot reckon with, as the ebbs and flows turn into violent crashing waves that transform the protective rocks of a tide pool into gravestones.

I don’t remember having ever seen so many dead sea creatures on one beach in all my beach-going or travels. Is this just the nature of the ocean?

With recent news of five of the Solomon Islands having been engulfed by the ocean due to rising sea levels (global warming?), I’m more inclined to think it must be humans.