Denis Santos
- Teen suffers from a terrifying sea bug attack
- Alarming sea bug attack plagues citizen in Australia
It was a wonderful day at the beach for Sam Kanizay in Melbourne, Australia. Little did he know, something is about to spoil his beautiful day and… flesh?
Piranhas?
Jarrod Kanizay, the father of Sam, said in a report that his son arrived home with his feet dripping in cold blood. They rushed him to a nearby hospital and experts believed that the injury looked like tiny bite marks.
The doctors were unsure what the predators were, so Jarrod came back to the beach and used strips of stick to capture “thousands of these little mite-type bugs”, as the doctors had described it.
“I collected these strange creatures from the same spot last night by trapping them in a net and standing in the water myself,” he detailed.
Further study
He sent the samples to marine biologists at Museums Victoria. There, these culprits were identified as species of crustacean called the amphipod or the sea fleas.
Amphipods, according to research, feed largely on the corpses of marine animals such as fish and crabs. As per Sam’s case, it is believed that the incident was caused by two factors including time of day and cold water numbing Sam’s skin. The teenager also shared that he stood in the waters for about 30 minutes before feeling pins and needles around his ankles.
When consulted to Richard Reina, an Associate Professor at Monash University,
“It’s only when you get the potential for hundreds or thousands of them to start biting you, for a long period, that you get the type of injury that Sam had. Unless you’re effectively numb, [usually] you’re going to notice and get out of the water before that happens,” he told in a report.
