"Sea hares" have been spotted all over several beaches in San Francisco, Alameda, Richmond and even Lake Merritt in Oakland. A "sea hare" is a slug. These particular ones are purple, weight up to 15 lbs and can be as long as 30 inches! Wow! That's HUMONGOUS! They are called sea hares because they have giant antennae which resemble rabbit ears. One guy counted 22 of them swimming through an inlet canal into Lake Merritt in Oakland. And many others are popping up in the coastal waters around SF, Alameda and Richmond California.
The boom in sea hares may be related to warmer temperatures near coastal waters, said Morgan Dill, a naturalist at the Crab Cove Visitor Center in Alameda. "We can't say for sure why we're seeing so many, but the Bay temperatures are definitely warmer this year," Dill said. I wish they had had pictures in this on line article, but they didn't. So I checked Wikipedia.org and they had a picture, but that one was orange and it could shoot ink like a squid.
According to Wikipedia, they had the following definition for sea hare. "The clade Aplysiomorpha, commonly known as sea hares (Aplysia species and related genera), are medium-sized to very large Opisthobranchia with a soft internal shell made of protein. These are marine gastropod molluscs in the superfamilies Aplysioidea and Akeroidea.
The
common name "sea hare" is direct translation from Latin
lepus marinus, as the animal was called so already in Roman times. The name derives from their rounded shape and from the two long
rhinophores that project upwards from their heads and that somewhat resemble the ears of a
hare." So look it up on Wikipedia if you want to see a pic.
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