SQUIDFRY 07.20.17: False Advertising

FALSE ADVERTISING… Squid’s lair is a humble, dark and watery place, and sometimes Squid wishes Squid could upgrade. Maybe a bigger backyard for Squid’s beloved English bulldog, Rosco P. Coltrane. Or more square footage in the pantry for Squid’s wholesale orders of shrimp-flavored popcorn. Squid couldn’t afford the median price of a Monterey County home anyway ($500K, according to Zillow), but Squid thought it wouldn’t hurt to look.

While window shopping, Squid stumbled upon the Sea Haven development in the up-and-coming city of Marina. The name alone sounded like the perfect mixture of salinity and serenity. But when Squid watched its new video, what Squid saw with Squid’s binocular vision was nothing like the Marina Squid knew.

“The undiscovered” and “sleepy seaside town” of Marina, according to the video, is a place with sunny, 75-degree beach weather. People – almost all of them white, although Marina is one of Monterey County’s two most diverse cities – wear preppy, lightweight clothing, instead of warm sweaters. Squid’s take: It would be a great advertisement for Martha’s Vineyard, less so Marina.

BASS HOLES… It would be an understatement to say Squid likes fishing. Apart from a few bags of shrimp popcorn a day, Squid lives off fishing. That being the case, Squid can see why some humans love it nearly as much, but sadly, Squid’s observed that humans often find a way to screw things up.

And Squid’s not just talking about overfishing of the seas, a dire problem that threatens marine life across the globe. Squid’s also talking about the things humans do in pursuit of fishing in lakes. Case in point: the Monterey County Water Resources Agency is earnestly trying to build an interlake tunnel between Lake Nacimiento and Lake San Antonio, a project – now estimated at $83 million – that would ostensibly increase the county’s water storage capacity by piping water, during wet years, into Lake San Antonio from Nacimiento, which fills up faster.

One problem? Nacimiento was stocked with invasive white bass in the 1960s, and current state law, enforced by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, prohibits moving them from one body of water to another. Because the bass disperse their eggs in the water, the only way to prevent them from moving lakes, if a tunnel were in place, would be a screen in the tunnel. The perforations would have to be finer than a window screen. Water Resources Agency Deputy General Manager Rob Johnson says the latest estimate for such a screen is a whopping $12 million. As to how that would affect the overall cost, Johnson says, “I’m not even going to go there.”

Guess who stocked Nacimiento with bass in the ’60s? The Department of Fish and Wildlife.