‘Sea Monster’ Washes Up In Texas After Hurricane Harvey

TEXAS CITY, TX — Hurricane Harvey’s historic floods along the coastal bend washed up some horrifying sights, but an Audubon Society social media director was more curious than traumatized by the beached, bloated corpse of a mystery sea species she found along the Gulf shore in Texas City last week. “What the heck is this?” Preeti Dasai asked in a tweet that included gruesome images of the creature.

Was it a sea monster, the lore attached to an enormous carcass that washed up in Indonesia a few months ago? That creature was initially reported to be a giant squid, but a handful of scientists said it was more likely a baleen whale, which are among the largest animals on earth.

The creature that washed up in Texas wasn’t as enormous as the creature in Indonesia. When Desai posed her question on Twitter, she was met by curiosity that matched her own, but also hype and hilarity. (For real-time news alerts and free morning newsletters, find your local Texas Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

“Sometimes I think it would be less work to just release sharks into flooded cities so the memes aren’t wrong anymore,” Shiffman fired back.

Dr. Kenneth Tighe, a biologist with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, identified the creature as a fangtooth snake-eel, or Aplatophis chauliodus, which literally translates into “terrible serpent” from Greek, according to FishBase, a global database of fish species. Or Tighe, suggested, it could be a Bathyuroconger vicinus or Xenomystax congroides, because all three species have fang-like teeth and are found off the Texas coast.

It’s unclear how the eel washed up on the coast, but scientists speculate it washed up in the strong winds and sea currents associated with Hurricane Harvey.

Desai tried to calm the Twitter universe, tweeting it was “just a damn sea creature trying to live its life.”

Photo: Waves pound the shore from approaching Hurricane Harvey on August 25, 2017 in Texas. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)