Sir Prawn a lot and a missing mullet

Back in the days of summer, when I was still in my twenties, we went to catch some prawns. My office mate needed some to use in his project looking at ocean acidification, so we waited for a sunny-ish afternoon and headed for the beach. We needed both species of prawn commonly found in this area, Palaemon serratus and elegans, and the bigger the better. We arrived, eat some ice cream and headed off into the rockpools. I began sweeping through the seaweed with my net willy nilly – occasionally getting a fairly large one, or something else interesting, but it quickly became unrewarding work. After a while we discovered it was more fun, and a lot more productive, to stalk the prawns (and no, im not talking about Facebook). Carefully moving a rock would uncover a whole gang of elegans which, by using the nets in a finely-tuned strike of upsettingly accurate co-ordination could be swept up for the bucket. Soon we had over a hundred and set off back for a sun burnt pint in the pub. Oh how I miss you summer days.

Soon afterwards we heard of a new prawn catching technique. We went to the harbour and tried it out – throwing a net on a rope into the deep water and suspending it at somewhere near middle depth. In the net was a mesh bag containing cat food which oozed out - like the shark-attracting ‘shit’ that Chief Brody shovelled over the side of The Orca in Jaws - attracting prawns from far around. The cat food did its job. Pulling in the net 20 mins later, we had caught some serratus that were approaching Jaws proportions.

In Tesco they would have been sold as King Tiger serratus. I’ve rarely been so happy.

During the first trip we had also brought back a few tiny fish fry that had been swimming in the rock pools. We put two of these into a tank in the aquarium and fed them a variety of the smallest things we could find. They soon began to grow and after some false hope that they might have been bass, we became fairly sure that they were baby mullet. Other things began to appear in the tank as well – starfish, limpets, anemones, prawns, a crab. They must have been tiny larvae in the water with the mullet, but we hadn’t noticed them until they had grown to eye-recognisable size. 6 months later, I was taking in some artemia to feed the now thriving mini ecosystem, but something was not right. Only one fish swam towards me in the search of food. The mullets were only one. I looked around the tank, then outside the tank, then the floor, but there was no sign. I emailed the technician who had spent the most time looking after them:

Will,
Bad news.
We are a mullet down.
No evidence of escape.
No body.
Not sure what to do.

Will had noticed the day before but didn’t want to tell me. I started to think about what might have happened and jumped to the conclusion that the crab was to blame. He had been getting bigger and bigger, and was now the size of a 1p piece. I thought if he could have got hold of the mullet, he probably could have eaten it. I checked the tank again for signs of the body but still nothing.

Dam that crab, he’s been getting too big for his boots for ages.

Before he could eat the other one I made the decision to take him out and put him in a tank on his own with some stock mussels.

Ha. You’re not smiling now are you? Mullet murderer!

Then this morning I was talking with Will about what to do with the remaining mullet and we suddenly saw the body. At the other end of the rack, a level below, the dried out shape of the missing mullet was suddenly all too obvious. Our eyes followed the path he must have taken; jumped up through the gap between the tank and the lid, flapped his way along the rack for a bit, then fallen through into the tank below.



I apologised to the crab as I returned him to his home tank.