Ye Guowei had picked up most of the trash, while Ye Cheng only occasionally found a few trash bags, but there were still quite a few crabs.

Every now and then a stone crab would slip out and be caught by Ye Cheng and put into the bucket. There were quite a few of them; in just a short while, Ye Cheng had caught four.

Aside from stone crabs, I didn't see any blue crabs or swimming crabs.

Besides crabs, the main thing to collect this time is snails.

Ye Cheng walked a few steps forward with his head down and saw several rocks scattered on the mudflats, with a few snails on the rocks and a few clams next to them.

Brothers, are you guys really not afraid of death? You dared to get close to this.

Ye Cheng bent down and picked up the rocks and snails. If the clams were to crawl near the rocks, they would be doomed; these snails were no pushovers.

They are called Litsea cubeba, belonging to the genus Litsea, which is a large group of medium to small-sized snails in the family Osteichthyidae. Their shells are oval or spindle-shaped, with nodules or tubercles on the shell surface and spiny protrusions. The shells are solid.

Of course, they also have two other names that are more familiar to everyone: spicy snails and bitter snails. Because they taste slightly bitter, they are not expensive. Most of them are eaten by themselves and can also be used in medicine.

Spicy snails can burrow and suck out the soft parts of clams, affecting the profitability of aquaculture.

However, the snail has a unique characteristic: it mainly lives in rocky areas. Sandy ground is too soft for it to move around, so it mainly forages on rocky surfaces. It eats both alive and dead food and is not picky about its food.

Those little clams would have been killed if they had been in the rocky area.

The large rocks on this mudflat had been mostly cleared away, and Ye Cheng only picked up a few before seeing none more. These were all brought in by the rising tide.

After walking a few more steps, Ye Cheng saw several tracks of snails crawling on the beach. He hurried forward a few steps and saw a snail rushing towards its baby clam.

Damn it, you still want to eat, huh? Ye Cheng grabbed it and squeezed the snail meat with his hand, squeezing out a large amount of water.

Compared to the fixed-area predation of the spicy snail, this type of snail is more harmful to farmers. This type of snail is the flat jade snail, which is also commonly known as the fragrant snail and the cat's eye snail.

The whelk and the cat's eye snail look quite similar, but the whelk is relatively more pointed, while the cat's eye snail is relatively flatter.

Their snail meat, or soft body, contains a spongy structure that allows it to absorb water and become very large. They use chemoreceptors to detect the metabolic substances released by clams and locate their hiding places, which can also be found in the sand.

Then they will slowly approach the clam, enveloping it entirely in their own flesh to prevent it from escaping.

At this point, the clams can no longer escape. They will use their radula to repeatedly scrape and drill small round holes in the clam shells, insert their long snouts into the holes, release digestive enzymes to liquefy the clam tissues, and then suck out the juices.

The whole process actually felt a bit like the alien bugs in the movie "Starship Troopers".

There was a clam seedling right under his feet. Ye Cheng carefully picked it up to check its viability.

However, it was already dead; it was probably crushed and eaten by the flat snail.

"Brother, these cat's eye snails are pretty fierce!" Ye Cheng shouted, holding up a clam. The clam seedlings had clearly grown a bit, but they were still eaten, which was a bit of a pity.

Ye Guowei shook his head. "There's nothing we can do. There will definitely be some. We can only try to get rid of them and hopefully eat less."

The three of them spent the afternoon collecting snails along the mudflats, and surprisingly, they got a lot of cat's eye snails, as well as stone crabs and spicy snails.

I was too lazy to sell these things, so I just took them back and gave them to Jiang Yunxiang to cook.

Generally speaking, people like Ye Cheng only need to collect things once a month. However, since they are still in the seedling stage, Ye Guowei plans to go every three days, otherwise he will just be idling at home anyway.

After dinner, I had just returned home when Duan Chunsheng came looking for me, his face full of excitement, as if he had just watched the World Cup.

"Second brother, why didn't you go today?"

"Uncle, I had something to do today so I didn't go. What happened?" Ye Cheng didn't mention that he had secretly gone out to sea last night.

"You have no idea," Duan Chunsheng said excitedly, pulling Ye Cheng down to sit. "Today, that fishing ground was full of boats, and we couldn't even pull the nets out properly."

"Huh? So many people? How are we supposed to catch fish?"

Trawlers need to tow for nearly an hour, and they have to avoid a long stretch of the course afterwards, so they need to keep a good distance from each other.

"That's right! Several trawlers' nets were tied together, almost capsizing the boat. I didn't dare go to the center area today, I just watched from the outer edge, otherwise I would have been in danger too." Duan Chunsheng said with great enthusiasm, such a lively scene is rare at sea.

"No, Uncle, why are there so many ships all of a sudden?" Ye Cheng had a bad feeling.

Seeing that Ye Cheng had finally gotten to the point, Duan Chunsheng lowered his voice and said,

"According to them, just last night, someone caught a large yellow croaker in that area of ​​the sea. It was a wild yellow croaker."

Ye Cheng's heart skipped a beat. Damn it!

Who leaked the news?

Seeing Duan Chunsheng's gossipy look, Ye Cheng could only pretend to be clueless, "Huh? Wild yellow croaker? That's amazing?"

While dealing with Duan Chunsheng, Ye Cheng tried to recall which part of the process had gone wrong.

Xiao Hu and I knew it, and no one should have seen us when we came back.

Then I told Tiger's mom, "Could it be that she spread it? It's not impossible."

I asked her to find a blind date for Xiaohu. Who knows, Aunt Wang might brag and tell everyone that her child caught a big yellow croaker.

Then there was my older brother and sister-in-law, but that was only mentioned at noon. After that, my older brother went to the mudflats with them. Even if my sister-in-law wanted to tell others, it shouldn't have spread so quickly.

So, the problem lies with Xiaohu's family. Either Xiaohu told them, or his mother told them.

Damn it, how am I supposed to fish now?

Just to be on the safe side, Ye Cheng asked one more question, "Did anyone manage to get any large yellow croakers today?"

"What a load of rubbish! Big yellow croaker, my foot! So many boats, all the fish are gone. I didn't catch anything today," Duan Chunsheng scoffed, then continued...

"They don't even consider that last night someone only caught one big yellow croaker, it was just good luck, do they expect to catch one every day?"

"What? One?" Ye Cheng exclaimed in surprise.

"Yes, just one, a little over a pound." Seeing Ye Cheng's strange expression, Duan Chunsheng also became curious.

"What's wrong? One isn't enough?"

Ye Cheng's mind went blank. "Holy crap, one."

Then it's not about myself anymore.

After all that, I thought it was because my secret of catching the big yellow croaker had been exposed.

"Is there any record of who caught it?" Ye Cheng pressed.