After three years of extremely warm water along the west coast of the United States in 2017, it completely cooled down, and the sea world seemed to be back to normal … But suddenly they appeared.
Since spring, millions of bizarre tube-like bioluminescent creatures have been clinging to the nets and filling the beaches along the West Coast. These rough, gelatinous animals, called fire beetles or pyrosomes, are cone-shaped tunicates. They are usually found in the tropics, but this spring they have gathered in the eastern Pacific Ocean in unprecedented numbers, spreading from Oregon to the Gulf of Alaska.
“It's really weird,” says Jennifer Fisher, a faculty member at Oregon State University Hatfield. "I've never seen anything like it."
“It's incredible how many there are!” Exclaims his colleague Rick Broder, who has studied various jelly-like creatures in the Pacific Northwest for 30 years.
One research network accumulated 60,000 pyros in five minutes. Fishermen near Sitka gave up fishing because they could not remove the tubular organisms from the hooks. They filled the water column for several tens of meters. But nobody knows why.
Typically, pyrosomes are so rare that some scientists have not even heard of them. What will be the consequences of such an invasion, experts do not undertake to say yet, but they are sure that this will affect the ecology of the ocean. For example, when all this mass of pyrosome begins to die, their decaying bodies can take huge amounts of oxygen from the coastal seas, jeopardizing the rest of the marine life.
They are commonly found in places such as the Ivory Coast, the Mediterranean, or the waters of Australia and Florida. Some specimens can reach 60 cm or more in length. Pyrosomes are as strong as cucumbers and covered with tiny tubercles. They use small hairs to move up and down in the water column.
In 2014 and 2015, when the heat bubble temporarily transformed the eastern Pacific, animals from different areas began to appear in places where they had never been found before. Sharks and tuna found in warm waters were caught in Alaska. Tropical sea snakes were crawling off California. And handfuls of pyros began to wash ashore.
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Then the temperature began to drop, and everything seemed to return to normal, but suddenly these creatures began to actively reproduce, filling the sea and land on the West Coast and especially in Alaska by spring. Scientists cannot explain how and why this happened. “These guys are probably eating a lot. They usually eat small particles, but they have to eat a lot to reach that density,”says Broder.
Whether they themselves serve as food for someone is also unclear. Scientists found several in the belly of the fish, but she ate them of her own free will or by accident, when she got into the crowd of luminous aliens, one can only guess.