Oct 2005 - The night I hunted Worm Spawn
A lot has happened over the past few months but nothing quite so surreal as the Palolo rising last week. Palolo is a reef worm that lives in the coral hidden away for most of the year but in order to reproduce it breaks in half and sends one end of itself to the surface to mate. These twirling worms come in green/blue for eggs and brown for sperm and they rise 7 days after the full moon in the middle of the night – usually. Though no-one seemed to know for sure when or where it was actually going to happen. As is common in Samoa, misinformation, guesses and fact all melded together and it was decided by our fearless leader that Sunday night it would be. Not that he had had any luck in previous years mind you, but without any better guide to go by we all packed into cars and headed to Salamumu, the top spot for Palolo catch apparently.
We arrived around 1am, got our fishing nets, torches and buckets ready and had a look around. No worms yet… so we set up on the beach and had a chat… a hour later – still nothing… so we discussed our life stories and watched an amazing array of shooting stars, or meteors as I am now suitably informed… several more hours later, after attempting to snooze in the cold night air on wet sand - unsuccessfully, word came that the worms were out. We looked up and saw hundreds of shadowy bodies and torches in the water up and down the coastline, it was quite surreal with the moon lighting up the waves and beach.
Not having any idea what we were looking for, we waded out in to the water and I was surprised to see a long greenish, swirling stringy thing in the water illuminated by our torches. It was amazing and weird and pretty exciting actually… and it turns out they were attracted by the lights, so soon there were many green and brown worms squiggling around us and we scooped up what we could over an hour or so before dawn.
Now why, you may ask, were we hunting sea worms in the first place? Well, Palolo is known as the caviar of the Pacific – at least in Samoa anyway. That’s right – you EAT IT! Some people eat it raw and alive straight from the sea, but most cook it up either in butter and onion on toast or with scrambled eggs. So we took it home, got ready for work and then proceeded to cook up and then eat these blue/green worms for breakfast! And we have photos to prove it too. For the record it doesn’t taste too bad, it just seems really weird to be eating worms… and blue squiggly ones at that.
posted by N-Lo @ 3:45 pm
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