I witness this marine worm mating swarm yesterday while searun cutt fishing. I've never seen this before in all the time I've fished the sound.
Thousands of worms concentrated on a very small 20 yard or so section of the beach. It was pretty cool to see the different sizes and colors.
Here are a couple of pics and a short video.
SF

http://vimeo.com/91227663

Worm Orgy!

Thats really cool, thanks for sharing.

Lots of little chumlings around Mukilteo over the weekend.

That's bizarre. It must be some mating thing where they have to pick out there own species? I would spend 15 minutes just watching em'. Mother Nature is pretty awesome (and extremely weird).

I witnessed one of those events on a South Sound beach several years ago. The worms came out just before dusk. It was a full moon, so we got to stick around and watch the cutts hammer those weird, squiggly things. For about 20 minutes, the scene was shear chaos. My friend and I tried to tie some "flies" (bunny strips with lead eyes) that imitated the pile worms and try them out on another trip. Our first prototype got hit hard a few times, but we figured out the fish were coming in for a stun strike, hoping to return and eat the stunned, less bitey prey, which was not conducive to hookups where we had the hooks placed. We tried another version, with hooks at the front and 2/3 back, and that worked better. We hooked three and lost two of them, but at least we got some extended action.

Those things sure are creepy-crawly.

Cool video, by the way!