A fisherman was left baffled when he caught a transparent mysterious sea creature off the coast of New Zealand.
Stewart Fraser caught the mysterious fish swimming near the surface of the ocean 70 kilometers (45 miles) off the North Island’s Karikari Peninsula when he had gone fishing with his two sons Conaugh and Finn.
He wanted to haul in the mysterious creature at first but decided to take a closer look instead.
“It felt scaly and was quite firm, almost jelly like, and you couldn’t see anything inside aside from this orange little blob inside it,” he explained.
Fraser and all of his fisherman friends are all mystified and bewildered as to what the creature could have been.
“We have no idea what it could have been but it was quite something and I’d never seen anything like it before,” he said.
Experts believe the mysterious sea creature could be a Salpa Maggiore (Salpa Maxima) marine invertebrate, commonly found in the Southern Ocean.
According to Paul Cox, Director of Conservation and Communication at the National Marine Aquarium that not many are aware about these salps, however, they are often found in colder seas, with the most abundant concentration found in the Southern Ocean.
“The salp is barrel-shaped and moves by contracting, pumping water through its gelatinous body. It strains the water through its internal feeding filters, feeding on phytoplankton from the upper sunlit layer of the ocean,” he said.
“They have an interesting life-cycle with alternate generations existing as solitary individuals or groups forming long chains. In common with other defenseless animals that occupy open water, jellies and hydroids for example, the translucence presumably provides some protection from predation. Being see-through is a pretty good camouflage in water,” he added.
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