Mysterious Balls of Goo Are Rolling Onto American Beaches Confusing Everyone

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I’ve been to my fair share of beaches, but never got the opportunity to witness anything strange (an overweight woman in a neon-orange bikini smearing vanilla ice cream over her face doesn’t count). It seems that other people, however, get to see the weirdest things that wash ashore: trainers, rubber ducks and bananas to name a few. The ocean is mysterious enough without things such as this rolling onto our sandy beaches though.

These lil guys may look like jellyfish without their tentacles, but they’re actually a lot weirder than that. Sure, it’s quite common to see stranded jellyfish, but beach-goers along the U.S East Coast are in for a strange sight this summer: thousands of knuckle-sized gelatinous globs are washing up from the surf.

Known as “jellyfish eggs” for their similar appearance, these creatures are called salps, and are more closely related to people rather than jellyfish, believe it or not. According to executive vice president and director of research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Larry Madin, the only correlation salps have with jellyfish is that they are both gelatinous and float around in the ocean.

Changes in wind direction and water currents are pushing the barrel-shaped animals on to beaches. This happened in Ocean City, Maryland (ironically enough), on July 11 and 12. Fortunately, they’re completely harmless; which is more than what anyone can say for the Portuguese Man o’ War and box jellyfish that were spotted on the coast of  New Jersey last week.

Salps belong to the tunicates group, says Madin, a tunicate specialist. Members of this group have a primitive backbone, which jellies and salps lack. These creatures can also “give birth” to long chains of clones. Sometimes the salp chain comes out in shapes; one species creates a wheel of salps, while another organises its chain into a double coil.

Salps’ cloning tendancies allows them to take advantage blooms. The creatures gorge themselves on the algae and pump out chains of salp babies. This is what makes salp a secret weapon against global warming. The algae they eat uses carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow. When the animals  release their fecal pellets, that carbon sinks to the bottom of the ocean where it’s essentially removed from the carbon cycle.

Basically, salps repackage carbon into big pieces that sink quickly into the ocean. Paul Bologna, director of the marine biology and coastal sciences program, says: “It’s one way of trying to balance out how much CO2 is in the atmosphere.”