This Is No Oil Slick: Huge Anchovy School Swarms Off California Coast By Terrell Johnson Published: July 9, 2014 At first, it looked like an oil slick floating in the water. But when scientists at California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography got a closer look Tuesday, they discovered what turned out to be anchovies swarming in the water near the La Jolla pier where they do much of their marine research. The massive school of fish baffled Scripps scientists, who say they haven't seen such a large aggregation of anchovies here in more than 30 years and didn't yet know why the school moved into the shallow waters off the La Jolla coast. Scripps communications officer Robert Monroe told the Los Angeles Times he thought at first it was a red tide, and hurried down to the Scripps pier to capture it on camera. "It was remarkable. From a distance it looked like an oil slick and you think 'What happened?' and then you get up close and it's amazing," he said in an interview with the Times. "It's like watching the motion of a lava lamp." See what Monroe captured in this YouTube video, in which he jumps in the water with the fish and some graduate students from Scripps:
Huge Anchovy School Swarms Off San Diego Beach (super cool video)
Subject: Huge Anchovy School Swarms Off San Diego Beach (super cool video) 
Thu Jul 10, 2014 1:14 am
