I’m trying to ID a marine organism I saw today. The location is a sand bar that is exposed a few hours at low tide. In a couple of inches of water I saw what looked like a gelatinous blob, clear but tinted orange, and coming from a hole maybe 1 1/2" wide in the sand. It appeared to have the consistency of a jelly fish but there were no tentacles or other structures. Just a blob that looked like it was anchored to or coming from the hole. The were several of these things scatted around the exposed sand bar. The blobs ranged from a few inches to nearly 12" across. Their shapes followed the contour of the sand The location was just inside an inlet on the New Jersey coast. Sorry, but no photos.
Apologies, I got nothing but as johnny hart knows, you need to be careful around alien sea creatures.
I don’t think its Sea Pork. Its much thinner in consistency - like runny Jello and basically, clear. I’m (wildly) guessing it might be some kind of defense against drying out when the tide is all the way out? “Is anyone here a marine biologist?”
Some possibilities include salps, sea snail egg sacs, or sea cucumbers:
It’s really hard to be any more precise without close-up photos and even then, it’s hard. But I’m definitely not a marine biologist, just took one semester course of it in uni.
Nope. None of those. I’ll have to go back and take pictures. There was a precocious little girl running around collecting shells and crabs etc. She said “Oh, those are eggs.” She may have been right but even close inspection didn’t reveal any individual structures. Just a clear-ish slime. I was tempted to dig up one of the holes but didn’t want to harm whatever was lurking at he bottom.
What does “followed the contour of the sand” mean, were they in some sort of linear formation? Maybe salp?
Edit: that was my first thought and I did a Google afterward. Here’s an example directly from New Jersey.
I’ve seen snail egg sacs and there’s nothing to actually see inside, the eggs are tiny and clear and have the same RI as the jelly.
But if salps are an annual NJ thing, then probably salps, which IME also don’t have much of an internal structure a layman could discern when they’re out of the water.
It could also possibly be something other than options already given, but I don’t personally know of any near-shore worms or burrowing crustaceans or shellfish that have a gelatinous exudation like that. Other options would be cnidarians or hydrozoans, but those generally have more structures like tentacles and the like, and don’t usually live in holes in the sand.
Could they be the remains of departed jellyfish?
Moon jelly remains, even without tentacles, usually have distinct coloured gonads you can clearly see if you look closely as the OP did.
I realize that, without photos, this is a difficult ask. By “following the contours” I mean that the slime was thin enough in consistency that, rather being a uniform roundish blob, the slime appeared to be carried downstream from the hole by the flowing water along the little valleys that form in the sand when water runs over it. Imagine a giant fingerprint. That’s what these patterns in the sand always remind me of. The blobs in the valleys might have been 10-12" long and a couple of inches wide… These ridges and valleys weren’t everywhere and, where they weren’t, the shape was round(ish) and maybe 1/2" - 1 "(? - I wasn’t taking notes) thick. The tide is wrong for further investigation this weekend so maybe I’ll go back the following weekend for pics. Also, I didn’t have my glasses on and didn’t put my nose up to the things so “close inspection” is probably mis-leading. More like “looked and squinted” without putting my beer down. Snail egg mass images on Google are pretty close but appear to have way too much “structure” or “firmness” to them.