Saturday, May 5, 2007

Unidentified Biological Organism

A diver named Jay Garbose videotaped this "creature" off the coast of Juno Beach, Florida. The creature has been tentatively identified by the Smithsonian as an unknown species of Nemertean Worm. They said he could name it if he found it again... ha ha. Nonetheless it looks pretty freaking cool. I'm amazed that anything of that size could have escaped notice for so long, especially off the busy coast of Florida.

Garbose says, "At first I thought it was a sea cucumber although no one's ever seen one stretched 7 to 10 feet the way this one was. It's sort of grey and putty-like and very smooth and taffy-like in the way it stretches. Some of my friends and I have sort of dubbed it the living intestine."

There's a video here.

2 comments:

  1. It's not always easy to recognize that you're seeing something new. The animal maybe quite rare to begin with, and to many people it looks so much like an eel or snake they identify it as such. I just recently learned that the phylum even exists, and I doubt most people have any inkling of it. Even if a person knew about it, they might not connect a strange creature with it.

    So other specimens have probably been seen, maybe even photographed or taped. But because they didn't realize just how strange it was, the observers didn't tell anybody with the education and training needed to give even a partial identification.

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  2. Hi John! As a newcomer in the blogosphere (who invents these words??), I'm learning a lot in your blog. Thanks for your welcome message!

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