Flesh-eating bugs attack boy paddling in sea
MARINE experts are struggling to identify mysterious creatures that are said to have eaten through the skin of a boy who had been paddling at a beach in Australia.
Sam Kanizay, 16, spent 30 minutes in the water at Brighton beach in Melbourne on Saturday to soothe his legs after a football game. When he walked out, his legs were covered in
‘I walked across the sand, looked down and I had blood all over my ankles’
creatures believed to be a form of flesh-eating bug.
“I walked out and saw what I thought was sand covering my calf and shook it off, and by the time I’d walked across the sand … I looked down and noticed I had blood all over my ankles,” he told 3AW Radio.
“It took a while to get all the blood off and it came back pretty quickly… It sort of looked like hundreds of little pinholes or pin-sized bites distributed all over my ankle and the top of my foot.”
Jarrod Kanizay, Sam’s father, said his son was calm and not in pain, but took him to hospital when it became clear that the blood “wasn’t washing away”.
“They ate through Sam’s skin and made it bleed profusely,” he said.
Mr Kanizay returned to the beach on Sunday night with a net filled with raw meat and captured tiny bugs which he believes were responsible. He then released a video of the creatures devouring the meat. “What is really clear is these things really love meat,” he said.
Experts gave mixed assessments of the identity of the bugs, noting that the creatures filmed by Mr Kanizay may not have been those which attacked his son.
Hospital officials initially told Sam they thought the creatures were sea lice but had 10 different hypotheses.
Richard Reina, an expert on marine biology at Monash University, agreed they were probably sea lice, adding that such attacks were “very rare” and that beachgoers should not be alarmed.
Others said sea lice were unlikely to be the culprits as such attacks were not common behaviour. Michael Brown, a marine expert, said he believed the creatures could be jellyfish larvae.