In 2002, mysterious green spherical objects appeared on the ocean coast near Hampton, Virginia, on the east coast of the United States. They were about the size of a golf ball and were soft like a sponge. There were a great many such "balls" and with each tide it became more and more, the entire local beach was simply strewn with them.
And here the disputes began, among local residents, tourists and just vacationers - what it is and where it came from … Marine biologists also joined the discussion of this phenomenon. Everyone came to the same conclusion that no one had ever seen anything like it before. And what is also very surprising, although the balls "smelled of the ocean", there was no characteristic smell of seaweed, if it were them. The mysterious green spheres gave the impression of being artificial.
On September 21, 2014, uninvited and unusual guests appeared on one of the beaches of Sydney. They looked like "space eggs", "balls of wool", "balls of moss". This is how they were described by amazed surfers who came to the beach early in the morning to “catch the wave”.
If you remember history, the most famous naturalist Karl Linnaeus described this wonderful plant in the middle of the eighteenth century. These amazing balls are a very rare species of living green algae. They were observed as early as 1820 in the vicinity of Lake Irrsee, located in Austria, as well as in distant Japan, where Kawakami Tatsuhito, a local botanist, gave them the name "Marimo". “Mari” is a toy ball, and “mo” usually means plants growing in water. The international name for these curious algae is Aegagropila linnaei.
The marimo colonies in Lakes Akan (Hokkaido) and Mivatan (Iceland) are among the rarest plant communities on Earth. Their existence depends on many random factors. Green balls really need sunlight, a slight breeze that causes water ripples, as well as a certain depth of the lake and the topography of its bottom.
But no one thought that the very rare algae found only on certain lakes would appear on the ocean coast. I wonder how, and whether they are at all …