It was an odd start to the morning Saturday in La Jolla, Calif.
First, residents were jostled out of bed at 7.34 a.m. by a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that was centered 19 miles out in the ocean.
“I was having coffee up on the balcony and I felt it shaking,” Kate Lutkemeier said.
She wasn’t the only one.
“I heard my doors and windows rattling, thinking that somebody was trying to get in my front door actually,” La Jolla resident Mary Skeen said.
The quake was felt all over the county, which isn’t uncommon in San Diego -- but what happened just minutes later was a little fishy.
“We just got here about 15 minutes ago and Lilly, what did you see on the beach?” John Feher asked his little daughter.
“Squid, squid, squid, squid, squid.” she replied.
Dozens of dazed Humboldt squid, which were roughly three- to four-feet long and weighed close to 40 pounds, were found flapping around on La Jolla Shores beach.
“It’s like their equilibrium is all messed up and they don’t know what they’re doing and they can’t back out there,” said beachgoer Bill Baumann. “It was like they got -- I don’t know -- all shook up.”
It didn’t take long for the seagulls to swoop in and start feeding on the squid, so beachgoers ran to the rescue and tried frantically to save them by throwing them back in the water. That proved to be a difficult task for several reasons: they were extremely heavy, very slippery, and when the good Samaritans did manage to get them back them in water, the squid didn’t know which way to go and kept washing back up on shore.
“Some people were saying it was the earthquake this morning that caused them to get disoriented, but who knows? Feher said.
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