**Pepperdine University Associate Professor of Biology Karen Martin specializes in the study of Leuresthes tenuis — grunion.

Q: How does one become a grunion professor?

A: It just happens, it’s not something you plan. I like to work on animals I can find easily, and these are the easiest.

The field biologists at Pepperdine like to work on local species. We like to take our students out in the field.

Q: Let’s start with the basics. What are grunion?

A: Grunion are a species of silver-sides fish, found only in Southern California. They love to surf, and they come in on sandy beaches following high tides after a new or full moon. They come in for spawning. That’s called a grunion run. They’re the only fish I know that spawn out of water.

Q: “Spawn.” That’s a polite word for . . . ?

A: When fish want to be together in a special way.

It’s hard not to enjoy working with grunion. They’re a great fish.

I tried to start working with them 10 years ago. I didn’t have the timing down. I started again four years ago. Now we have the timing down.

Q: What does it mean to “study” them?

A: I don’t like to get wet, so the fish come to me. We either collect the fish or we collect the eggs, and we study them.

They lay their eggs where the eggs won’t get wet until they’re ready to hatch. From a biologist’s standpoint, that’s really interesting.

One of the things we study is the way the metabolism of the eggs develops out of water. They don’t have a specific set time, the way most eggs do. They wait for the surf to come back up and wash them out to sea.

It’s like a space capsule. It’s enclosed. There’s no way to get in more food or for the animal to move around. Yet they have to keep metabolizing.

You find it increases until the 10th day, when it is ready to hatch. It keeps that relatively high metabolism for up to an additional four to five weeks, waiting for that trigger.

Q: When can we see them run?

A: For example, they ran on March 20. High tide was 5-1/2 feet above. Then it falls off until after the next new moon. The grunion are waiting for the highest highs and lowest lows.

If you want a fancy, new word: syzygy. It’s when the sun and moon are aligned — the highest high tides and the lowest low tides.

Q: If I’m having difficulty conceptualizing this, how do the grunion figure it out?

A: Fish are really smart. I don’t know how. I don’t think anybody really does.

A lot of animals are on cycles. There is a big movement of the ocean, so it’s easy to understand. But they respond in a pretty precise way. It’s about an hour to an hour-and-a-half window.

Q: Do they talk to each other?

A: They are schooling fish, so they are able to communicate in the sense that they school together.

Q: When is the next run?

A: The night of May 3 at 11:10 or the night of May 4 at 11:45.

I think this is the reason grunion are not studied much. It’s pretty labor intensive. You don’t know that they’re going to be there.

They do this only in the spring, from late March to mid-July, two or three nights after every new and full moon. But some runs are better than others.

Q: Where in Malibu can we see them run?

A: They find a sandy beach with a nice, long, slow wave approach, not necessarily a good surfing beach. The fish actually ride in on the waves.

Q: Why isn’t this a more exact science?

A: They’re like any animal. You think you understand the animal, but . . . .

Rain or storms change the pattern of waves. Sometimes it’s a lovely night, and they don’t show up.

The problem is that there’s a large population of fish, and not all are spawning.

Q: Are these questions you pursue?

A: No, they’re too hard for me. I pursue questions I can answer.

I’m actually a physiologist. So I study their metabolism — the eggs out of water and how adults can be active out of water, yet they’re fish.

Q: Do you recommend the life of a scientist?

A: It’s a different kind of creativity, but scientists must be creative, and they must be original, and they must produce interesting material constantly in such a way that their colleagues accept it.

In some ways it’s like being a poet. If you’re driven, do it. If you have a burning curiosity about the subject, study it. But it’s not easy, and you’re not going to get rich.

Q: But you can stay up late and watch fish.

A: I also study intertidal fish. Part of the reason I got involved in grunion is that low tides are at 5 or 6 in the morning. If you ask a college student if they’d rather stay up ’til 11 or 12 or get up at 5 or 6, a lot will say they’d rather stay up late.

Q: Have you produced that interesting material?

A: [She fishes for a copy of her new book, “Intertidal Fishes — Life in Two Worlds,” Academic Press, 1999, which she co-edited.]

Everything you would want to know about fish is in this book.

Q: Grilled or sauted?

A: People ask me if you can eat a grunion. I say, ‘Yes, but don’t bother.’

Q: Where did you do your studies?

A: University of Oklahoma for undergraduate. It’s pretty far from the ocean. It was covered by an ocean during the Cretaceous period.

I came out here to UCLA to do my graduate work. That’s where I started working on fish.

Then I went to University of Washington at Friday Harbor Labs in the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound for a one-year, post-doctoral fellowship.

My main focus has been fish out of water, which is a metaphor.

Q: For?

A: I suppose for someone like me doing something like this.

Q: Do you catch the grunion?

A: We can only catch the fish with our hands. You have to give the fish a fighting chance, or else it is illegal. Also, it is illegal to catch them in April or May. After May, adults 16 and older can catch them only if they have a fishing license.

My recommendation is: Catch them, look at them and throw them back. You can’t eat them and they don’t live in captivity.

Q: May we discuss delicate matters? What does spawning look like?

A: The female digs tail-first into the sand. The males seem to cue on her movement, so they’ll find her. One or more males may surround a female. They just release their milt.

Q: Pardon?

A: Milt. The sperm.

The eggs are bright orange and full of yolk.

Q: So you can bring the kids?

A: Kids love these things.

Dress warmly and wait. If you go out about the time of the high tide, you see a few fish coming up at first. They might come out for one wave and then be washed back.

If you’re lucky, the numbers might increase.

They’ll be in a narrow band, so you have to get right down to the waterline. They will come in on one of the larger waves, and the fish will remain on the sand to spawn.

The next big wave, the fish will wash right out.

That’s why you have to stay there and be patient. Another wave, another batch of fish will come.

On a good run, you can hear the flopping on the beach. It sounds like popcorn popping.

Q: Any recommended beaches?

A: No, because I don’t want them to be loved too much. The problem with any living thing is that you see a lot of them so you think they are not very valuable. I’m very happy to have people come and watch if they don’t bother the fish.

They’re a coastal fish. They’re exposed to whatever’s coming out of Malibu Lagoon. If the sand is polluted too, the eggs are being exposed to the pollution as well. We don’t want the grunion to have the additional pressure of being caught.

Q: What does your family think when you come home after midnight, smelling of fish?

A: Both of my sons have come out with me. My husband is very supportive, but he has to go to work early in the morning.

It’s the best job. It beats working.

Kim Devore’s amusing and interesting article re the ancient Albatross referred to my visit to the venerable Malibu landmark quoting me: “Retired Judge John Merrick only went there to see the lights.” This requires amplification.

I was a member of a three-man party commissioned by the Township Council to investigate a complaint voiced by the property owners on the hillside across from the Albatross. It seems that the Albatross had a World War II searchlight in its front yard, which, when lighted, was automatically and continuously rotated 360 degrees, with its powerful beam periodically sweeping the Malibu heavens and intermittently shining into the windows and homes of the hillside residents.

In my negotiating with owner Mrs. Burnett, it developed that she owned a fleet of these searchlights and rented them out for automobile, market openings, motion picture movie previews, etc., and she envisioned positioning her lights along Pacific Coast Highway pointing the way to the Malibu Albatross.

Fortunately, she never carried out that plan, and she compromised over the Albatross searchlight by merely turning it on at night and locked in a stationary position pointing at the Malibu heavens and an occasional airplane, not intruding on the serenity of her hillside neighbors. And we successful negotiators got the hell out of there before Mrs. B. could deliver any salty adieus.

John J. Merrick,

judge, retired

I write in regard to the article on the Albatross [“From no-tell motel to costly condos in one history lesson,” April 22 issue].

I worked at that infamous hotel/restaurant for Eloise Burnett (your Louise Barnett) from June 17, 1973 until it closed down two months later.

I had just come by Trailways bus to Southern California from a small town in Pennsylvania. I was 24, but I was still wet behind the ears.

I saw Eloise’s help wanted ad in the L.A. Times: “Restaurant-Bar, live-in, no car,” and it gave the address on PCH.

I walked from Santa Monica all the way to Malibu (there was no bus service then), and applied. She hired me right there, to wait on tables for dining customers, mix and serve drinks and clean the rooms upstairs — everything. I was one of about six motley “drifter-type’ men, mostly young, who made up her staff.

At that point there were no women working there at all.

Judge Merrick was right that Eloise “was an old gal with a very salty tongue.” She put on a gruff and callous exterior, because she knew she had to be tough to survive. But more than once she came to my defense when the other guys bullied me.

“For protection” Eloise was forever accompanied by a German Shepherd she called “Bach II” (its predecessor’s name having been “Bach”). And the atmosphere of the lobby of the Albatross was punctually pierced by the cries of a resident great pure-white cockatoo with flowing head-feathers, which Eloise only occasionally let perch on her shoulder and feed sunflower seeds.

Most of us hired help slept outside the building in a metal utility shack on the concrete desk, and it was cold! But she’d let us use the vacant upstairs rooms to take long hot showers any time we wanted. She put us through our paces and made us work for pay and our keep, but she was liberal with time off and staples like house food.

In the 1960 Columbia film “Strangers When We Met,” to which you alluded, one can see how the building was unusually designed to look like an oversized yacht, even to the extent of having brass-framed portholes for windows. In the first scene that shows the interior, Kirk Douglas sits at the long, studded brass-topped bar, a glass-encased old-fashioned gold-colored fire extinguisher behind him; he then walks toward the cocktail deck before a huge brass swordfish suspended over the wall-length stone fireplace. All these legendary fixtures were still in place, when I was there.

I was asked several times by male guests in whispered confidence if it was a brothel, but I had no evidence of any kind that it ever was, and told them so.

When she finally closed the place, Eloise Burnett moved up into one of the canyons (I won’t say which), and lived there on a several-acre lot in a spacious trailer, while she authorized the beginning of construction on a big house. She took three of us, “her boys,” with her up there, and paid us a little to help clear the brush and rocks off the lot. I slept in a small addendum to the trailer.

But after a week and a half of this, I finally decided to get a real job, and walked down the canyon, and out of the life of one of the most unique and original women I’ve ever had the privilege to know.

I heard she completed the house, and enjoyed it for about eight years before she died. That would be about 1981 or 1982.

The thing I remember most fondly about my time at the Albatross was being able to listen to the incredible selection of hit songs on the colorfully lit up grand Seaborg Jukebox that sat in state on the Hawaiian-motif glass-enclosed cocktail lounge, while I served people their drinks on a Saturday night. There were beautiful renditions of tunes on the bill, by the likes of Dean Martin, Andy Williams and John Gary. Many are rare or unattainable today thanks to LPs being replaced by CDs. And almost half the jukebox was filled with Frank Sinatra’s singles.

As I proudly wore a long-sleeved white dress shirt, and a mod ’70s black bow tie (Eloise liked that tie), I served the bourbon-and-soda and the brandy Alexander to, respectively, a middle-aged man and a woman awfully young and pretty to be his wife; and outside under the exterior lights, the waves — I can still hear their thunder — splashed way up and dotted the glass with droplets.

The middle-aged man leaned way over to me and pressed a $20 bill into my hand and said simply, “Play Sinatra.” I did gladly. And he and his date were there a long, long time.

Dennis Keith Klopp

Would you like to give people in wheelchairs the chance to stand again?

If so, please contact your state assemblyman or woman right away, and express your opinion on Assembly Bill 750, the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Research Bill.

The doctors gave us no hope. “You’ll never walk again, never close your fingers, never be able to father a child,” our son was told. When our insurance cut off his therapy, saying further improvement was not likely, it took two safety belts to keep our son from sliding off the wheelchair. He literally could not lift his own hand.

But with the aid of advanced research, medication and therapy, we were able to bring back the muscles on the backs of his arms. Now, instead of having to be picked up and carried, he could transfer himself from bed to chair — even drive an adapted truck.

Today, Roman attends college at U.C. Berkeley, where he also works; and he is the father of a beautiful baby boy. Research helped him, and there is more help on the way.

Research is the answer to that great dream. Assembly Bill 750, the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Bill, offers a painless way to permanently fund that research. Modeled after New York’s unanimously passed Richter Bill, AB 750 puts a $15 surcharge onto speeding tickets and other traffic violations. That money will go to spinal cord injury research for cure. Car crash, by the way, is the No. 1 cause of spinal cord injury.

We need your help. As my son Roman puts it, “Please take a stand — so everybody can.”

Stand with us. Contact your state assemblyman or woman. Support Assembly Bill 750, the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Bill.

Don C. Reed

chairperson,

Californians for Cure

We gave AGY the week off. Are we the best staff, or what?