Scientists discovered and described a hitherto-unknown deep-sea crustacean. It resembles a feathery or furry lobster. People find the oddest things in Oceania.
This reminds me of an experience that I had as an adventurous child paddling around in the warm waters of the Pacific. I encountered a creature of which I've never been able to find record. I was probably 10 years old, and was swimming with my family among the sand flats in the Sowi area of Manokwari Bay. Coral reefs and other havens of marine life are found quite close to shore, and a child on the surface (I tended to float on my tummy, to keep my feet elevated away from sharks and stonefish and other vicious animals) just a few meters into the water could get a good view of creatures in the shallows there. I would hold my breath and keep my eyes open under water (perhaps all this willful exposure to harsh sea water eventually compounded my optical issues?), loving to see the colorful fish, budding coral, and the infrequent sea snake. On this particular occasion, I looked down, and moving over the sand (maybe 3-4 meters down) was something that looked like a the convex outside of a smooth brown coconut shell, and all around its edges were blurry ripples that looked like flagella-type things that were propelling it. It was hard to determine exactly how big it was, due to distortion of the water, and me being several feet away, but it might have been 30 cm or so. It moved pretty fast, and it wasn't as if it was crawling. No, it was skimming the surface of the sand. I watched for several seconds, until it went out of view, and then I swam back to the beach, because if there were unknown animals cruising in the water, I preferred to be on the solid ground, where they couldn't pull me under (remember, I was just a little kid, and yet even then, I recognized that discretion is the better part of valor).
Does anyone know what I might have seen? I took marine biology with Rafe Payne, and when I asked him, he couldn't identify it from my description. I've looked in text books and journals. The closest things that I've seen is, believe it or not, are artistic renditions of trilobites, but those are supposed to be extinct. Could it be possible that in the waters around New Guinea (the land that time forgot), there still lurk prehistoric crustaceans? Maybe there were trilobites until the 1980s, and it just so happened that I saw the LAST TRILOBITE EVER, and now they have all died off (Note to self: Blame global warming? V. good thesis, but hard to stick as equatorial waters are warm anyway.). Wouldn't that be interesting, and such a joke on all those paleontologists that probably wish that they could have been the ones to see the Last Trilobite Ever, instead of a snotty-nosed kid on an evening jaunt to the beach. And if not, then what did I see, so many years ago?
5 comments:
Perhaps a horseshoe crab, or some sort of relative of it? Though I think it is some sort of relative of the trilobites. When they are smaller, they look more round, and quite honestly I don't think I've ever seen one swimming that I'd know how exactly they look moving in water, but that's the best I can come up with.
Could it have been a stone fish?
No, Mummie, I don't think it was a stonefish. Stonefish aren't like coconuts, nor do they skim across the sand, since they don't stray far at all from coral clusters.
I think Liz has the closest guess: horseshoe crab. I wouldn't originally have thought so, as I don't recall seeing any tail. However, maybe I just didn't notice it. And I wonder why Rafe didn't make the connection... What a letdown! My Last Trilobite Ever theory didn't pan out.
Ah well, you saw the last horseshoe crab in Sowi bay, maybe...
Well, sometimes things happen to their tails, and then you have the whole distance and distortion of the water thing going.... But horseshoe crabs are still cool!
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