The Aplysia Scam

May is rapidly drawing to an end.

The uncertain winds of the early month have switched to the summer pattern, and soon the jenn-aire effect will be upon the island and its eclectic residents. There is a certain resolve to survive another tourist season, another hurricane season, to slay the torpid days of summer by immersing ones body in the equally torpid waters of the Gulf, cool drink in hand.

It’s the time of the season when a mans fancy turns to….Aplysia.

Aplysia brasiliana, commonly called sea-hare are a critter that shows up right about now, and hangs around till fall, disappearing before the winter temperatures cool the Bay and Gulf. Where they go, nobody knows, and fewer care. Locals call them inkfish, though they are anything but fish. They’re really a snail without a shell, a true sea slug, a gastropod. The brown gelatinous creatures are all over the place this time of year, slowly flapping modified appendages that look like wings, undulating and gliding on top of the water, in a blind and mindless search for seaweed. Poor swimmers, some get caught in the surf, and eventually end up on the beach where they lay in puddles of purple ink, to decay in the hot sun. The ink they produce is harmless to humans, though irritating to other marine life, this substance seems to be their primary defense mechanism. When disturbed or threatened they exude ink profusely, turning the surrounding water, clothes and hands a beautiful, deep purple.

My friend Sara, who has devoted a good deal of her academic career to trying to understand these animals (and again, I’m not sure why) says they aren’t worth a shit to eat. No matter how you fix them. Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to try a mouthful of this gooey, nauseating critter, and I’ve eaten just about everything that swims or grows in the sea. Along that line of thinking, I’d probably never consider eating a jellyfish either, common sense just sometimes prevails.

They do make nice aerial fodder though, especially when lobbed or launched from water ballon slingshots at unsuspecting victims, either in the water or on the beach. They hit with a most satisfying wet splat, exploding in a fine mist of ink that’s pretty awe inspiring. An unprovoked, unexpected Aplysia bomb attack truly strikes terror, and sometimes anger in the uninitiated. Fortunately, the stain is not permanent.

Neurobiologists love Aplysia, because the animal has a giant nerve axon, one easily studied. I imagine that a great deal of our collective understanding of nerve function and disorders has come from studying this lowly organisms responses to the variety of tortures that this branch of biology conjures up, but like the tunicate, it isn’t nearly as glamorous, or controversial as stem cell research, so you’ll probably never see anything about it on CNN or Fox news. Dr. Mengele I presume?

For us, Aplysia have always been a windfall. In a former time, we’d load the old four wheel drive with an ice chest of beer, an empty ice chest, and our surfboards, and head down to the condos on the bay. In the course of a drunken evening, we’d paddle around in the Thompkins channel, collecting Aplysia on the nose of our longboards, periodically transferring them to the empty icechest (now with seawater in it) waiting on the lighted docks. The beer chest would get progressively lighter, and the Aplysia ice chest heavier, till the beer finally ran out and we had a few dozen Aplysia which we’d hurry back to the lab and put on life support, the aerator. The next day we’d call UTMB in Galveston, and they’d immediately send a little white haired faggot down to take our icechest of Aplysia back up to Galveston, and pretty soon, in a week or two, we’d receive a check for a hundred dollars or so. I think we were getting something like two fifty each for the little buggers. Our dedicated field collecting allowed the Dr. Frankenstein types a perpetual fresh stock of innocent critters to run their experiments on. This worked out pretty good for us, and it kept us in beer for a few days, whenever they needed the critters anyway. I never thought much about the Aplysia scam after I left the lab that time though.

Today, I collect Aplysia with nets on the jetties, risking jetty rash from falls on the slippery algae covered granite. I’m a salaried employee now…I make the big money so I’m informed that I can’t make that extra check anymore. This benevolent entity wants to keep me fully locked in indentured servitude. We keep the Aplysia alive here, feed them the amazing Gracilaria that I culture, clean out the tanks whenever too much shit accumulates, and ultimately cull them out and package them up, each individually weighed, bagged with seawater and oxygen and carefully packed in a Styrofoam shipping container, taken to FedEx and given a first class ride to Houston.

Aplysias are big business too, there’s even a place in Florida growing them in vitro just to provide enough for the researchers. There was a scare a couple of years ago when many researchers switched to using laboratory rats, but apparently, they just couldn’t get enough of the ol' Aplysia, and switched back again to their tried and trusty brand. And, the scam has been elevated to a quasi-legitimate bureaucratic undertaking, complete with invoices, requests and accounting sheets, there’s gold in them hills!

But, now someone else makes ten bucks apiece for the bastards, this place makes a cut, and yours truly, the humble narrator of the Eye of the Hurricane gets the big weenie. I guess that’s Karma or some shit. Ah, for the good old days….

And if that isn’t bad enough, the neurobiologists want these animals in a certain size range, and not kept at the lab for anything more than a few days. I’m wondering if maybe they want them with cute little nametags too, maybe tags that say things like “Hi, my name is Admiral Alfred the Aplysia, won’t you be kind to me and feed me just 6.5 grams of either Gracilaria or Ulva a day, keep my quarters clean and free of shit, and promise to pay attention to me?” Just wait till the fucking things start getting scarce. I bet they won’t sing that song then.