UC#2 was recently exploring the southern California coast with friends looking for Viking and Sumerian relics. No relics were found, but they came across some California black sea hares during low tide.
A Little Background….
About
The sea hare is a marine snail, found in shallow water and occasionally in rockpools on the low shore. They feed on seaweed and it is thought that this is what gives each sea hare its colour, e.g. green sea hares are eating green seaweeds like sea lettuce whilst the reddish-maroon sea hares are eating red seaweeds. Sea hares have an internal shell, which is around 4cm long and transparent. Like sea slugs, the sea hare is a hermaphrodite and they sometimes mate in chains, with an individual acting as both male and female. They lay eggs in long pink threads, which are deposited on seaweed and look a bit like pink spaghetti.
Did you know?
Sea hares get their name from the upper pair of head tentacles that look like a hare’s ears!
California sea hare eggs are encased in a protective sticky jelly, and look like masses of spaghetti noodles. A sea hare may lay up to eighty million eggs; its larvae hatch in 10-12 days.
The horn-like structures seen on the head of the sea hare are called rhinophores. (“Rhino” means nose, “phore” means carrier.) Rhinophores allow these animals to pick up chemical cues in the water, such as those from other sea hares during mating season.
When threatened by predators, a sea hare releases a dark purple fluid in defense. The ink gets its purple color from a pigment in the red algae that makes up part of the sea hare’s diet.
A sea hare can’t see like we do — its simple eyes can only tell light from dark.
This slug has a secret shell! The California sea hare has an internal shell that encases its vital organs.
In the water, the sea hares are quite beautiful and elegant, but during low tide, like a fish out of water, they become blob-a-tized.
Summary
Aplysia vaccaria, common name the “black sea hare” or the “California black sea hare”, is a species of extremely large sea slug, specifically a giant sea hare, a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusk in the family Aplysiidae, the sea hares.
By Dimitris Siskopoulos from Alexandroupolis, Greece By Dimitris Siskopoulos from Alexandroupolis, Greece By Dimitris Siskopoulos
Will there be a Buffet?
Maybe….
Human use
Sea hares are consumed in several parts of the world. An example may be “酱爆海兔” (jiàng bào hǎi tù), lit. “sauce-fried sea hare”, a Chinese dish featuring sea hare and occasionally squid quickly fried in a sauce. In Hawaii, sea hares, or kualakai, are typically cooked in an imu wrapped in ti leaves.
Using the google, 酱爆海兔 turned up these yummy recipes.
So sea hares may or may not be edible, but if you’d like to make a Japanese sea hare look-alike dessert, check his out.
Let’s reverse the food chain….
Semi-Sequitur: The Heart Sutra
We noticed that one of UC#2’s companions was wearing a beautiful Heart Sutra bracelet.
The Heart Sūtra (Sanskrit: प्रज्ञापारमिताहृदय Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya or Chinese: 心經 Xīnjīng, Tibetan: བཅོམ་ལྡན་འདས་མ་ཤེས་རབ་ཀྱི་ཕ་རོལ་ཏུ་ཕྱིན་པའི་སྙིང་པོ) is a popular sutra in Mahāyāna Buddhism. In Sanskrit, the title Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya translates as “The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom”.
The Sutra famously states, “Form is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form.” It is a condensed exposition on the Buddhist Mahayana teaching of the Two Truths doctrine, which says that ultimately all phenomena are Śūnyatā (emptiness).
It has been called “the most frequently used and recited text in the entire Mahayana Buddhist tradition.” The text has been translated into English dozens of times from Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, as well as other source languages.
By myself – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5 By Christopher J. Fynn – Own work based on a traditional design, CC BY-SA 4.0 Chinese text of the Heart Sūtra by Yuan dynasty artist and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322 CE)
The Lion’s Roar
As the late Zen teacher Robert Aitken has written, “the Heart Sutra is a very brief text, abbreviated from a monumental work, the Prajnaparamita Sutra, probably the Astasahasrika edition of 8,000 lines, which was composed just before the Common Era. The Heart Sutra was produced shortly thereafter. it is recited every day in almost all Mahayana temples in Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam, except those of the Pure Land, and has been recited there every day for 1,600 years and more. Today you will hear it daily throughout the Buddhist diaspora beyond East Asia.” You will also find it recited in Buddhist groups of varying backgrounds in the West and elsewhere.
Explaining the main thrust of its message, Aitken Roshi writes, “The Heart Sutra says that form is emptiness; emptiness is form; form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly form. Moreover, sensation, perception, formulation, and consciousness are also like this. This seems to be an unnatural kind of contradictory intelligence, but it is the expression that is contradictory—there is no contradiction in nature. Very strange things live side by side in evident harmony—intimate harmony, even identity. The Heart Sutra is an exposition of nature, essential nature, the way things are.”
“Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body. This Body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body. The same is true of Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, and Consciousness.
“Listen Sariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing.
“That is why in Emptiness, Body, Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations and Consciousness are not separate self entities.
