Just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water, California beachgoers report tiny piranha-like critters attacking their feet.
Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie “Jaws” about a shark terrorizing swimmers near a small New England town was much more dramatic than the current “min-shark” infestation in California. Not deadly and certainly less painful than a great white shark bite, the tiny isopods can draw blood and cause intense pain.
Live Science further reported:
Beachgoers in Southern California are being targeted by swarms of tiny, aggressive sea bugs, previously dubbed “mini-sharks,” that seem to have a thing for feet. The shrimplike creatures have been snapping at the ankles of locals promenading along the shoreline, leaving people hopping around in pain, according to local news reports.
Experts identified the biting bugs as water-line isopods (Excirolana chiltoni), a relatively common crustacean species that grows to be around 0.3 inches (0.8 centimeters) long and can form swarms of more than 1,000 individuals, according to Walla Walla University in Washington. The little nippers have a painful bite and can even draw blood from the sandy feet of their human victims, but are not a major cause for concern, scientists say.
On Sunday (Aug. 28), CBS8 San Diego reported biting incidents on beaches near San Diego. Local resident Tara Sauvage, who was bitten by one of the isopods at De Anza Cove in the Mission Bay area of the city, described the experience to CBS8, calling it “painful” and “surprising.”
“I had blood all over my foot and in between my toes,” Sauvage said. “It was like small piranhas had bit me.” But after she rinsed off her feet with water the pain subsided within 15 to 20 minutes, she added.
Water-line isopods are found year-round along the California coastline and on beaches in the Pacific Northwest regions of the United States and Canada. People can be bitten anywhere the tiny critters congregate, and though groups of biting incidents rarely occur consistently in a single area, they do sometimes happen.
“They can be pretty nasty when they get going,” Richard Brusca, an invertebrate zoologist at the University of Arizona and a former curator of crustaceans at the San Diego Natural History Museum, told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “They’re like mini-sharks” that can attack you “like a wolf pack” but with a bite comparable to that of a mosquito, he added.
The isopods spend most of their lives buried beneath the sand along the tideline of sandy beaches and typically emerge in shallow water as the tide goes out. When a dead fish or other large carcass washes up, the critters “quickly strip the carcass of flesh” using their serrated mandibles, according to Walla Walla University.
The isopods’ ability to quickly gnaw their way through flesh has caused problems in some fish farms where caged fish are unable to shake off the parasites. The ravenous crustaceans can also create issues for forensic pathologists, making it difficult for experts to identify the bodies of drowning victims, according to the website Biodiversity of the Central Coast, a digital field guide to the biodiversity of British Columbia, Canada, maintained by the University of Victoria.
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