Pink Elements on Parade - Hopkins' Rose Herd at Pillar Point

Perhaps it has something to do with climate change and the warming and/or acidification of the ocean. Perhaps it is related to the collapse of the sea star population due to a wasting virus. Perhaps it is akin to a seventeen or something year cycle, but 2015 appears to me to be the "Year of Hopkins' Rose(Okenia Rosacea)" in the San Francisco bay area. I've been visiting the tidepools of San Mateo County since 2004 and in all of my many explorations and wasted weekends, I have only pondered the notion of running across one of these beautiful beasties (assuming them to be a more southern phenomenon). This year, however, the brilliant pink pom-poms are all over the place. At Pillar Point you can lose count trying to determine their number and, as I discovered only last night during one of the low "king" tides, there's a similar situation at Linda Mar (fortunately at Linda Mar the sea star population hasn't been nearly as wiped as at Pillar Point...it's nice to see a starfish when you go to the sea). And I will admit, my pink herd of Hopkins' Roses is an unnatural creation. I gathered these tiny wonders and plopped them down together in this pool. Hopkins' Roses are not social by nature and seldom seek each other out. However, having said that, and having staged this scene, when I was at Linda Mar I did see many clusters of them in various pools, seaweed clumps, and rocks. It was probably coincidence that they were bunched, but it does indicate that my artifice is only partially artificial...because I definitely did see spots where there were three or four of them within maybe an 8 inch space. I couldn't help thinking of that segment from the Walt Disney animated classic "Dumbo" entitled "Pink Elephants on Parade" when I saw them all together. I would have stolen that music for the background but it would not only have been out of place over these slow movers, also I'm sure the Disney folks would silence it. Another image that came to mind was herds of mastodons crossing Pleistocene plains (the overwhelming geological grandeur of the California coast always puts me in mind of epochs and eras and ages and evolution) and the irony is that Hopkins' Roses were scouring the rocks for their bryozoan prey eons before mastodons pounded the earth. The musical background is also a collection of various movements (not in consecutive order) from Claude Debussy's "The Children's Corner" performed by the Riverside Wind Consort, appropriated from Musopen.org and ostensibly free from copyright restrictions.

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