‘It looked like a big condom’: Diver is stunned as bizarre-looking 30-foot ‘sea serpent’ appears in front of him off of New Zealand
- Ben Laurie came across the creature while diving at Cape Brett in New Zealand
- He said he had never seen a 30-foot sea creature like it in his years as a diver
- In a video of the dive the creature floats underwater surrounded by smaller fish
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This is the moment a diver comes face to face with a bizarre-looking underwater ‘sea serpent’.
Ben Laurie, 21, encountered the 30-foot creature while diving near Cape Brett on New Zealand’s North Island.
Despite his years of diving experience he said he had no idea what it was and had never seen one before.
In a video of the dive, the creature – which he compared to a condom – floats underwater surrounded by much smaller marine life.
What is that? A diver in New Zealand encountered this 30-foot sea creature during a dive and said he had never seen anything like it before
‘We were diving there for kingfish and we had plugged a couple, and then we were coming up from one of the dives when my friend saw this thing,’ said Ben.
‘It did look almost like a big condom. It was 30 feet long and more than a foot and a half, and it was just flowing with the tide,’ he added.
Ben Laurie, who has years of experience in the water and is an ambassador for the WildBlue dive shop, said he had seen nothing like it.
‘I didn’t know what it was at the time, so it was quite a confusing thing,’ he said.
‘We get these little like plankton build-ups – they’re like small stringy things but they’re only like eight inches long – so I thought it was just a large one of them.
Big fish: The sea creature is seen underwater surrounded by much smaller marine life, pictured by a diver near Cape Brett in New Zealand
Lived to tell the tail: The rear end of the 30-foot sea creature which is in fact believed to be a pyrosome, which feeds by filtering microscopic plant cells out of the sea
‘But one of the guys touched it and said it wasn’t soft at all, it was more like a cardboard sort of texture.’
In fact it is believed to be a pyrosome, a floating colony made up of thousands of sea squirts which feeds by filtering microscopic plant cells out of the sea.
Each squirt draws in water from outside the pyrosome and then releases the filtered water inside the colony.
‘Apparently they only come from depths of 2,000 metres, so it’s quite rare for them to be up in the shallows like that,’ said the diver, from Kerikeri.
‘It must have been sick or something. Once it gets a bit too high, because it’s got more of a softer texture, the fish seem to eat it, so that’s why it stays deep.’
‘A scientist said it’s pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime rare thing to see.’