No matter how routine our lives can often seem, there’s always more going on in the background of them than we usually realize.
We can live in a city for years without ever meeting the guy in the clown suit with the monkey who hangs out downtown, only to discover that he’s basically old news to everybody else.
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And it turns out the natural world can have its own equivalents of that guy. As one woman in Australia discovered, we can come across something that doesn’t even seem like it belongs on this planet only to learn that we had probably come close to obliviously running into it hundreds of times.
Australia has more than its share of breathtaking beaches and Scarborough beach north of Brisbane is no exception.
But for one woman, it was likely hard to concentration on the beautiful scenery once she happened upon a bizarre discovery.
As she would later post on Facebook, she found something that she seriously couldn’t identify.
As Yahoo News reported , she asked her Facebook followers, “Does anyone know what this is? Found at Scarborough beach with blood coming out.”
Unfortunately, it seems they were just as stumped as she was.
As The Daily Mail reported , some hoped that the woman could fetch a good price for what they thought was ambergris (whale vomit). Others jumped right to the conclusion that this was a byproduct of something from another planet.
However, the creature actually turned out to be a sea hare, which is a common life form in Australia that’s known for grazing on toxic algae.
According to professor Ian Tibbetts from the University of Queensland, that “blood” was actually ink that sea hares use to ward off predators.
As Tibbetts told Yahoo News, the creature excreting this particular gunk could either be a ragged sea hare or aplysia.
Either way, both the ink and the sea hare’s skin and digestive tract are toxic and anyone who discovers a sea hare should make as little contact with it as possible.
Unfortunately, they’re a serious danger to some of our more curious friends.
As The Daily Mail reported , three dogs throughout Western Australia died last year after licking sea hares.
h/t: Yahoo News , The Daily Mail
