The list of wildlife in Australia that will haunt your nightmares continues to grow. The beaches might be great in Australia, but the sea lice will apparently eat your skin off.
This is exactly what happens to 16-year-old Sam Kanizay, wherein the teenager was attacked by sea lice.
After a tiring football game, Kanizay just wanted to soak his aching legs in the water at the beach in Brighton, Australia. But the water wasn’t the respite he hoped—when he emerged a half hour later from the waist-deep water, his ankles were streaming blood.
He walked home, “leaving a path of blood,” and his father Jarrod and 14-year-old sister Gabby took him into the shower to wash off the blood.
“I didn’t feel anything untoward when I was in the water,” the teenager said. “It was cold, so I expected my legs to go numb.”
At first, he assumed the bleeding must’ve been because he cut himself on a rock, but then the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
“Blood covered both of my feet and I was leaving little pools (of blood) everywhere,” he said. “I thought I had maybe stood on a rock, but the amount of blood quickly told me that wasn’t it.”
It “looked like a war injury,” his father told the news outlet. Kanizay took a shower to try to stop the bleeding, but the wounds weren’t clotting—and he kept bleeding.
Unable to walk, the teenager was brought to a hospital suffering from “pin-sized holes” that were bleeding profusely.
Two hospitals in the area were unable to identify what caused the attack, so Kanizay’s father decided to go back to the beach and investigate himself. He dropped a hunk of raw steak in the water, and taped what happened next: Tiny, mite-like creatures swarmed the meat.
A nurse stated that it may have been sea lice, “but it was just a guess.”
Nick Murray and his 13-year-old son Will began bleeding from their feet after standing in the Sandringham bay for 10 minutes, and the pair believed that sea lice were to blame.
University of Melbourne marine biologist Professor Michael Keough stated that it was a possibility:
“They’re scavengers who’ll clean up dead fish and feed on living tissue. They’re mostly less than a centimeter long, and so the bites they make are pretty small, and so that’s more consistent with pinprick size marks.”
“It’s just food for them. Especially if he’s been standing around for a long time, it’s the chance for more of them to come in and start biting. Just be attracted to a little bit of blood. And if he’s standing in the water and he’s cold and may not notice a whole lot of little bites,” he added.
“We had the emergency room full of everybody that was working there just fascinated, they were all on Google afterwards, hypothesizing as to what happened. They pretty much had 10 different hypotheses but nothing yet,” Jarrod said of their experience at Sandringham Hospital.
Thanks to his video, experts were able to confidently identify the creatures as lysianassid amphipods, a type of scavenger shrimp-like crustacean commonly known as “sea fleas.”
But experts considered the episode unusual. “Sea lice normally go after dead or dying animals—they bite humans too but not as severe as this case,” Richard Reina, associate professor at Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences said.
Watch the shocking incident here: The Telegraph/Youtube
Sources: OpposingViews, The Sydney Morning Herald
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