A teenager over in Australia emerged from a beach with blood pouring from his legs after tiny “meat-loving” sea bugs ripped through his skin.
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Sam Kanizay, 16, emerged from the beach in Melbourne on Saturday with blood all over him, in a scene that resembled a horror movie. Sam only spent 30 minutes in the sea but during this time something must have attracted the flesh-eating bugs. He said:
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.
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.
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Jarrod, Sam’s dad, said his son was OK and wasn’t in any pain, although he did go to the hospital due to the high level of bleeding. The next day, his dad returned to the beach, filled a net with raw meat and captured a load of the little bugs. You can watch them in action below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75gf_jGM5J8
They’re little savages aren’t they? I always thought that being eaten alive by piranhas would be one of the most slow and painful deaths, but I think we’ve just found something even worse.
Experts have given varying assessments of the identity of the bugs and said that those caught on film could be different to the ones that ate Sam’s legs. Although surely that’s not the case – how many different types of flesh-eating bugs are there in Australian water?
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An expert on marine biology at Monash University, Richard Reina, said that he thought the creatures were probably sea lice and that attacks like this were “very rare”:
When it happens you brush it off, or move, or get out of the water and there’s no consequence, whereas in this case, Sam was standing in cold water for quite a long time.
Either way, it’s not something that you’d want to happen to you – I guess that’s one more thing to add to the list of scary creatures you’ll find in Australia along with sharks, snakes and massive spiders.
