'It's alive': Family baffled by 'massive' creature on beach
A family has made an amazing find while at the beach.
Adam Dickinson, wife Eve and their two children were walking along Pakiri Beach, north of Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island, on Monday morning when they came across a mysterious creature.
“It was pretty incredible and really hard to describe,” Mr Dickinson told Yahoo7.
“I just told the kids not to touch it.”
They soon realised it was a jellyfish.
When asked if he had seen anything similar to it before, Mr Dickinson replied, “definitely not”.
“It almost looked like a load of muscles contracting,” he said.
Ms Dickinson told Yahoo7 it was “massive”, “really impressive” and like none of the other jellyfish they had seen before.
“We then noticed it starting to move slowly. ‘It’s alive,’ my boy kept saying. We then grabbed a stick and poked it to see if it would move again, and the jellyfish kept moving,” she said.
“The kids then started blowing on it. ‘It can feel us mummy’, he (my son) said as it moved again.”
The family spent ages looking at the creature.
“My boy kept saying it looked like a volcano,” Ms Dickinson said.
“It was pretty amazing to see. Also, the other jellyfish we found on the beach we turned them upside down to see if it would look similar to this one and none of them did.
“This one was definitely different. We have never seen anything like it. It was pretty cool.”
The mum said she had the creature identified as a lion’s mane jellyfish.
New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s Diana Macpherson also told stuff.co.nz it was a lion’s mane jellyfish.
Ms Macpherson adding the creatures were “pretty common” during “spring and summer” due to plankton beginning to bloom.
According to science and tech site Redorbit, the species is the largest and longest jellyfish known.
There are reports from 1870 that state one lion’s mane jellyfish was found washed up with a diameter of more than 2.3 metres and tentacles more than 36 metres long.
The jellyfish is also known to have a painful sting but it’s not fatal.
In other news on mysterious beach finds, three brothers were aghast when they stumbled upon a 4.2-metre squid.
The trio found the giant squid on a beach in Wellington.
Back in July, a mystery marine species resembling a pile of seaweed with hundreds of moving tentacles washed up on a Vietnam beach.
Footage shows the dark brown creature twisting and turning.
It has a star-shaped body in the middle with several branches spiralling out from the centre.
