Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water … a "mysterious blob" shows up.
Officials with the Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina were baffled after a “mysterious mass” washed up on the beach, reported USA Today.
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The National Park Service, who manages the Cape Lookout, said the blob was actually found “a few months ago,” but they had been unable to identify the origin of the gelatinous figure. The truth is out there!
So this week the agency asked for the public’s help in ascertaining what the mass could be by taking it to Facebook.
“Beach mystery -- Do you know what this mysterious mass is?” read the message on the Cape Lookout National Seashore’s account. “It was found a few months ago on the beach. So far it has escaped being identified - although it might be something like the egg sacks of a squid (but we aren't sure). Anyone want to take a stab at identifying it for us?”
Of course the responses took the route of going from the hilarious to the absurd.
Many left comments referencing horror films saying it resembled a face hugger in “Alien,” or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” While another took a more inventive approach by remarking that it looked like a “few pairs of gloves that something laid eggs in.”
After a few days, the mystery was solved.
"It is an egg mass of a squid, or actually the eggs of many squids as they lay their eggs together to create the mass," the National Park Service wrote in an update to the original post. "These squid are an inshore squid species which belong to the same scientific family, Loliginidae, as the California Market Squid of the Pacific Coast and a number of European squids. They all lay similar looking egg masses.”
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The updated continued: “Off the North Carolina Coast, there are three species from the Loliginidae squid family – the Thumbstall squid, the Longfin inshore squid and the Slender inshore squid – which could have laid the egg mass that showed up on our beach."
Anyone still in the mood for calamari?
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