Posted on 06/21/2002 9:59:40 AM PDT by Rodney King
Thousands of mysterious objects land on shore
BY STEVE JUSSEAUME sjusseaume@seacoastonline.com
HAMPTON - Maritime tumbleweed? Whelk egg cases? Plastic fishing line? Extraterrestrial seed pods? Natural cleansers?
Everyone has a theory over the tens of thousands of round Brillo pad-like balls washed up with the incoming tide last weekend along the coast off Hampton. What they exactly are has caused a debate among beach-goers, marine scientists and casual viewers alike this week.
The soft, spongy balls, the size of golf or tennis balls, appeared with the incoming tide along a 300-yard stretch of sandy beach beginning at Northside Beach, just north of Plaice Cove, Friday or Saturday.
"There are just thousands and thousands as far as you can walk," one Hampton resident reported early Sunday morning, adding that she has never seen anything like it.
"I don't know if they're animal or mineral or what," the woman said after walking her dog along the sand.
Marine Program scientists at the University of New Hampshire were contacted, but said they would have a hard time identifying the material without seeing it. One local biologist was perplexed after viewing the greenish balls, most of which are perfectly round and have an ocean smell, though not a strong sea-weedy odor.
"They look man-made to me," said Ellen Goethel, a marine biologist who serves on the Hampton Conservation Commission, when she first looked at the balls, hundreds of which remained at the high water mark at the beach into Wednesday.
The stuff, whether manmade, probably wasn't balled up at first. It was washed up into balls, most likely because of wave action close to the shore that carried the material along the bottom of the ocean floor off the beach, Goethel said.
"It could be sheets of plastic threads, like carpet threads, that were broken up, carried by the waves and rolled up into balls as it came in ..."
Though Goethel couldn't find anything in any marine biology books that corresponds to the balls, after visiting with some local fisherman, she decided the balls could be some kind of sea grass.
"Under magnification, they seem to have some sort of molecular structure," she said.
One pressing problem, Goethel cautioned, is that if the stuff IS plastic, some fish or marine animals could ingest it thinking it was food.
"Baleen whales, for instance, filter what they eat. This stuff could get into their stomachs. They can't pass it, so it remains there, the mammals feel full and die of starvation," Goethel said.
"Seals won't eat it, they use their sense of smell and it doesn't smell fishy. But some fish are dumb and will eat anything.
"My first instinct was to go down there and get it all off the beach," Goethel added.
One investigator had another idea, after looking at strands through a magnifying glass. "My guess is its some type of (bundled up) phytoplankton," offered Kevin Twombly, a marine digital production engineer with the Andover, Mass., firm Maptech.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Pennock, director of the marine program at the University of New Hampshire, asked for a sample of the balls, and said he would try to ascertain what the material is, manmade or natural.
"It could be some type of sea grass, but we'd have to take a close look at it," Pennock said, siding, initially, with Goethel's opinion.
While the little green balls may remain a mystery, at least for the time being, one fisherman working at the Yankee Fisherman's Cooperative this week had his own idea to their identity. And a novel solution to their disposal.
Off-loading his catch, the guy looked at one, smelled it.
"This thing looks like a Brillo pad. Thousands, eh?" he said. "Yea, natural Brillo. Pack 'em up. Ten for a buck."
Uh, as opposed to having no molecular structure? WTF?
I noticed that brain-dead statement too. Maybe she meant cellular tissue-like structure.
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