RAPTOR RED

TENTACLES APRIL

If Raptor Red and her male consort could dive into the Early Cretaceous sea at dusk, they’d see the armored shellfish coming up. Shells with tight spiral coils, like giant land snails, are swimming along the sloping ocean bottom, armor-protected mollusks that scan their surroundings with intelligent eyes, each with a wide iris and a small, dark center.

When a fast-swimming fish-lizard tries to grab one of the panzer-squids, its eye closes, and a heavy hood of protective tissue comes down over the mol-lusk’s head, sealing off the opening in the shell.

When the disturbance disappears, the hood opens again and the beast’s jet propulsion resumes. A muscular cylinder protrudes from the shell opening. A high-pressure stream of water is directed downward, and the armored spiral body shoots upward.

These are ammonites and nautiloids, the most intelligent and mobile of all the armored Mollusca. Even faster are the Cretaceous squid, who zip by at twenty knots, their cigar-shaped bodies made lighter by the near total lack of shell armor.

Raptor Red and her consort watch this extraordinary shellfish circus through the moonlit water. Every once in a while an ammonite or squid breaks the surface and becomes marooned in a tidepool, where the raptors can gawk at these exotic beings. The two raptors paw the empty shells of ammonites washed up on the beach - there are dozens of varieties.

Some of the shells are so smooth, Raptor Red can’t hold on to them with her claws. But most ammonite shells are sculpted into ridges and furrows, knobs and bumps. She pokes and scrapes each shell with her hand claws and then with her lips and teeth. It’s fun.

And sometimes tasty. When she nibbles at the opening in one big ammonite shell, she’s rewarded by a live, plump crab with one big claw and a naked, soft-skin body.

Crnch - gulp. Very fine meat. And soft-shelled too!

Raptor Red isn’t the only crab-loving predator active tonight. She sees movement down in the quiet, clear pool. A beautiful ammonite with a deep and narrow coiled shell pauses a few feet below the surface. His sensory tentacles zip out of their protective sheaths. He’s intrigued by a thick-shelled crustacean, plowing up mud. The ammonite jets closer. He zips out another dozen tentacles. The supple, muscular arms swarm over the crustacean. The lobsterlike crustacean feels its grip on the sand bottom loosen as the tiny grappling hooks on each tentacle lock onto the crustacean’s horny hide.

The crustacean is pulled up to the center of the ammonite’s tentacles. A heavy, parrotlike beak protrudes.

Cwack! The central nervous system of the crustacean erupts in a flurry of electrical signals. Then its neuronal switchboard goes dead.

Raptor Red hears the ammonite jaws crunching the big crustacean, and she pulls her head back. That must be a dangerous mouth! is her conclusion.

The ammonite squirts water fore and aft, moving his muscular jet-hose quickly to the front and the rear, counteracting the water currents sweeping over the pool. Each piece of prey is dragged into his mouth by the raspy ammonite tongue, its surface armed with backward-directed barbs.

The ocean night has endless delights. The male raptor sees a swarm of big coiled ammonites, three feet across, rise through the water column, a swift-swimming shadow pursuing them at thirty-knot speed. There’s a flash of a slender snout, and one ammonite is plucked from among his fellows.

Strong conical teeth crunch across the ammonite where the body is attached to the inner shell surface. The long snout shakes the shell, and out falls the soft, still living mollusk body, forcibly freed from its armor. Sssssssgulp. The plump molluscan morsel is swallowed by a snout carried on a streamlined, shark-shaped body.

It’s a wide-fin fish lizard, Platypterygius. The wide fin swooshes its tall, tuna-shaped tail. Upper and lower prongs of the tail are narrow, tapered, back-curved blades that push against the water in quick strokes. The sharklike top fin cuts through the air-water interface.

The wide fin breaches the surface. It gulps air in the corner of its mouth and submerges a half-second later.

Fast - very fast. The male raptor is good at judging speed - that’s why he’s such an efficient hunter on land. Fast -faster than me. He watches the wide fin swim just under the surface.

The wide fin turns and attacks a huge school of bullet squid - belemnites - ten thousand strong. Hundreds fly out of the water, their cigar-shaped bodies skipping across the surface.

Raptor Red ducks her head as she’s bombarded by bullet squid landing onshore. Most have eight tentacles that thrash about, trying to get their owner back into the water. Some, the males, have an extra tentacle set. All have an armored core of thick shell in the rear of their bodies.

Raptor Red picks up a live bullet squid and bites down, hoping for a repeat of her experience with crab meat. But instead she breaks a tooth and spits the belemnite out. Much too crunchy is her gastronomic verdict. She tries another, holding it down with one hind foot as she bites it underwater.

Suddenly a blob of squid ink squirts out and covers her snout. She has to wiggle her snout in the water to get the ink off. She makes a mental note: cross squid from the list of edible seafood.

The wide fin is still hunting just offshore, his gigantic eyeball searching the water for another group of bullet squid. Moonlight playing down into the water column reveals a second school. That’s enough! The wide fin comes in at twenty knots.

The fish lizard’s eyes focus on faint reflections from the squids' rear steering fins. At this high speed the targets will be in jaw range in a few seconds.

The squid disappear, replaced by blobs of inky black hanging in the water column. The wide fin shakes his head vigorously, snapping blindly. No good - he misses. The squid are too wary tonight for his style of attack-from-the-rear.

Raptor Red and her consort know that the prey-predator game is being played down there, and it excites them to watch.

Below the school of squid a dark body mass is moving slowly, smoothly. It’s an elasmosaur, a long-necked sea reptile, swimming too far below for the squid to see. But the upwardly facing eyes of the elasmosaur can see the squid - they’re silhouetted against the moonlight.

The dark body of the elasmosaur speeds up just a little, and its long, snakelike neck coils into tight S-shaped flexures. Four tapered flippers give the elasmosaur a smooth maneuverability.

Three squid are plucked from the school by darting strikes of the elasmosaur head. Then two more disappear, struck from below and behind. The elasmosaur thrusts its neck from the squids' blind quarter, the direction where their visual detection systems work least well.

Finally another squid is impaled on the forward-slanting elasmosaur teeth.

Just then, the elasmosaur is forced to bank left in an emergency evasive turn. It’s bumped something large. No worry - the elasmosaur can see the unmistakably lumpy form of a sea-turtle, plowing through the water with its two fore flippers. There’s a bright explosion of green light - the turtle has bitten a jellyfish.

The elasmosaur banks again, this time to avoid a pair of Meer-Krokodil, an ocean going crocodilian with the shape of a long-bodied shark.

The raptor pair climbs a rock ledge to get a better view, but they can see little of the three-dimensional aquatic ballet. They hear a flopping sound coming from a pool below the rock. Raptor Red pokes her hand in to investigate, but something wet and awful wraps itself around her fingers. Hundreds of tiny hooks adhere to her skin. When she scratches with her other hand, a pretty coiled shell falls, and dozens of sinuous tentacles writhe around. Raptor Red kicks the shell with her hindfoot and watches the ammonite right itself in the water six feet offshore. A Meer-Krokodil with armor plate embedded in its back snatches the ammonite and swims quickly away into the depths.

Raptor Red thinks about the sea. Slimy things -grubby things - too-crunchy things - big, fast, scary things. It’s all too much. She leans hard against her consort, and he leans back. She’s glad she’s a land animal. She’s glad she’s pair-bonded.

The sensory input is too confusing. Raptor Red likes poking at unknown animals, discovering things that move and sound and smell different. But this watery world is too full of strangeness.

She sits down. Her consort sniffs the air for a few minutes, then joins her. He leans toward her and she leans toward him.