Environment
Why Is Santa Cruz Awash in Dead Squid?
Beaches are littered with a trail of rotting cephalopods stretching for 11 miles.
If you're the kind of person who likes to poke dead things with a stick, there's no better place to be right now than Santa Cruz County. Hundreds of corpulent squid recently washed onto local beaches and began decomposing in the sun, forming a squishy buffet line for seagulls nearly 11 miles long.
It's quite weird for this slimy squadron to have chosen Santa Cruz for a mass beaching. The Humboldt squids, large predators known for their aggression toward scuba divers, typically favor the deeper waters of the Pacific from southern California down to Argentina. But they've been appearing around Monterey Bay more often in recent years, with the previous wave of cephalopods slithering onto land in October in Pacific Grove.