Continuing on, however tenuously, with our "pork" theme from yesterday's church sign featuring the apparently quite delectable pastor Ressler of Saint Louis, I present you with "Sea Pork," the plague of South Carolina beaches. In fact, they invade beaches all up and down the eastern seaboard and into the Gulf, surprising hapless swimming children and wandering beachcombers by their self-defense technique of imitating a large pile of mucus or discarded squid intestines.
Tempting as that may sound, you probably should curb your desire to throw some fresh sea pork on the grill, although various fish, skates, and sharks favor them. Supposedly they got their name because people thought they looked like a piece of fatback, perhaps washed up from some sunken sea kitchen. I certainly never would have thought of that, but they say that the sea can play tricks on a man's mind...
Deliciously (?) enough, the little amorphous masses are also known as 'Sea Liver.'
In reality they aren't pig livers or hearty gobs of snot sneezed into the ocean by some salty sailor who's a bit under the weather. Instead they are members of the happy-go-lucky tunicate sub-phylum, which includes much prettier, but still not delicious, looking creatures, such as the Blue Sea Squirts. Many tunicates live together in colonies, and when sea pork floats onto your foot it's usually a dead colony that floated to the surface as corpses tend to do and was washed ashore by a storm.
Another reason not to toss it in your frying pan to have with your morning eggs that.
