'Extremely toxic' creature scientist 'has never seen before' found by boy on Aussie beach
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An "extremely toxic" creature that looks like an "alien" has washed up on a beach in Australia. The beast was photographed at Batemans Bay in New South Wales by Mrs Cassar, who withheld her first name. She explained how her five-year-old son found it in the shallows and was playing with it on his boogie board.
"They were tubular organisms that were mostly a blue colour, and each tube seemed to be a singular organism but they were all bunched together and attached to a rock," she said. "I thought maybe it was appearing differently to what it normally would due to either being dead or out of the water. I didn't touch it, only the rock it was on. I left it in the water and made sure my son didn't touch it again.".
In the snaps, the animal's mysterious blue appendages are seen splayed out in different directions. Mrs Cassar shared the images with a naturalists' page on Facebook in a bid to find out what it was. One person branded it "an alien hair scalp", while another called it a "nightmare I had just a few nights ago". Others suggested different types of zoanthid, an order of animal commonly found in coral reefs, living as colonies.
Asked for his assessment, John Veron - a scientist nicknamed 'The Godfather of Coral' - agreed the tubes was "weird" and said he had "never seen them before". But he suggested it could be Isaurus, a genus of zoanthid. Marine biologist Rosemary Steinberg, who specialises in coral, said it was a part of the animal kingdom that was "notoriously difficult to ID without having the critter right in front of you".
