SPAWNING GRUNION
From March to August, with a peak in April to June, hundreds of thousands of seven-inch, silvery fish called grunion wash out of wavelets along sandy beaches in southern California to Baja California in Mexico to spawn. These slender, streamlined fish spawn at night in wet sand at high tide levels, for a few nights in a row, every two weeks, under a full or new moon. Whole beaches at the high water line shimmy and wiggle with the many thousands of grunion piled on each other and ready to spawn. Each little fish flops around on the wet sand just up from the foamy surf. Each female looks for a place to dig into the sand with her tail, and, eventually, does, straight down about five inches, until only her gills and head is above the sand. Then she releases her many tiny eggs into that hole she dug, while one or more males wrap themselves around her and eject sperm into the hole, which seeps down and fertilizes the eggs....