‘Peculiar-looking’ finger-like creatures wash up on California beaches. What are they?

Dozens of finger-like sea creatures washing up on Southern California beaches are puzzling some visitors.

“We thought they were a toy, but then we saw them all over the place,” beach-goer Susan Latin told The Orange County Register after encountering them on San Clemente Beach. “They are so cool.”

The tubular creatures also have appeared on Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach, marine biologist Julianne Steers with the Beach Ecology Coalition told the publication.

“You almost want to put them on each one of your fingers and make little puppets — they are just so peculiar looking,” Steers told The Orange County Register.

The bizarre-looking creatures are free-floating colonial tunicates, also called sea pickles, Nate Jaros, curator of fish and invertebrates at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, told the Malibu Times.

Normally found in the open ocean, sea pickles are colonies of tiny, multicellular creatures that feed by filtering seawater, McClatchy News reported.

“There’s sometimes hundreds if not thousands of these individual little tunicates that group together on this cylindrical shape and drift through the ocean feeding on small plankton and bacteria,” Jaroff told the Malibu Times.

The tubular, gelatinous colonies, which also are bioluminescent, periodically wash ashore, as they did in Monterey in 2019, McClatchy News reported.

“It’s not completely normal, but it does happen,” Jaros told the Malibu Times. “It happened recently and it happens up and down the California coast sometimes.”

Despite the name, sea pickles are not edible. But they also aren’t dangerous — they have no sting or bite, and any found washed up on the beach are likely to be dead.

This story was originally published June 29, 2021 at 7:22 AM with the headline "‘Peculiar-looking’ finger-like creatures wash up on California beaches. What are they?."