When Preeti Desai was trying to assess the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey, she accidentally stumbled upon the depths of hell.
"What the heck is this indeed", Ms Desai.
The spine-chilling monster with its thick, serpent-like body, daggered teeth and NO EYES had social media stumped - the only thing they knew was that they were never going to swim again.
Some commenters threw out the suggestion of eel and a biologist agreed, telling the BBC it was a fangtooth snake-eel.
Fangtooth snake-eel. Oh okay then, so just a mixture of all of the worst things in the world – cool.
Dr Kenneth Tighe, a biologist and eel specialist, said it could be a conger or garden eel as "all three of these species occur off Texas and have large fang-like teeth".
Ms Desai, who is a part of the Audubon Society – a non-profit group dedicated to conservation, said she was seeing how extensively Hurricane Harvey had damaged the environment when she stumbled upon the creature.
"It was completely unexpected, it's not something that you'd typically see on a beach. I thought it could be something from the deep sea that might have washed on to shore," she reported.
"My main reaction was curiosity, to figure out what the heck it was."
She also said she left the horrifying monster eel on the beach "to let nature take its course".
But, monster or not, it is a citizen of earth, obviously a predator. I have seen conger eels but never one this huge. There are hundreds of thousands of aquatic species. Any average person has only ever seen a couple of hundred. With the oceans getting more acidic and warmer, thousands of these species hover on the brink of extinction.
The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.
These experts calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species are becoming extinct each year.
What a great post and We don't know what is lurking in the deep dark waters of the sea .
ReplyDeleteClimate Change is making a lot of species come toward the top .
No eyes , that thing don't need eyes to live so deep in the waters . I bet it had one heck of a sense of smell .
Great post .
Love you
Witchypoo
I have never seen an eel the size of a full grown shark. These eels are cousins to the conger eels I used to catch with my cousins when I was a kid in the Channel Isles. About three feet long at most and skinny. They have small teeth, nothing like this monster. We used to catch them for the tender meat they provide. But I think this Goliath eats kids.
ReplyDeleteLove you too
Shadow of the G.