We just got back from a week in Sarasota FL. At every beach we visited during our stay we encountered these things that I referred to rather maturely as Sea Penises. I couldn’t tell if they were animal or vegitable and since I’m not keen on touching dead things on the beach I never really checked. They were about 10" long white cylindrical objects with a bit of fringe or roots on one end, and when they decayed enough there was an inside that looked like a grey and black puka shell necklace They were vegi enough to look a bit like a leek or limp celery, but then the rotting ones appeared to have some sort of skeleture.
I may not be following your description but the first thing I thought of was a tube worm. Sorry, my connection is running slow and I can’t find any better pics.
My original thought was sea cucumber, but those pictures appear way too complicated to be one of these things, these were smooth and uniform in thickness from top to bottom. The pictures of the sea worms are closest to what these looked like.
Well, if it wasn’t squid eggs I would wager sea squirts. I don’t know if you have species similar to *Ciona intestinalis* * in Florida, but they grow quite large (~10 cm) and appear like floppy penises/penii/(insert correct plural form here) when taken out of the water. That why we have the mock-latin name Penis mares for them
*note that the link is to British waters but used as an example of the kind of sea squirts I’m talking about
The normal English plural, FWIW, is penises. There are a few technical usages for which penes is preferable, but either is normally correct; in common speech penes appears affected, as if showing off pedantry.
One instance in which -penes is called for, however, is when speaking of more than one hemipenis, the double structure found on some reptiles. Since it’s pretty much a technical term, the only correct plural is *hemipenes[/o].
Nope! Man, being such a beach novice and given the prevalance of these things on the beach I figured this would be a no brainer. They were much thinner and uniform in diamater.
I couldn’t tell if they were animal or vegitable and since I’m not keen on touching dead things on the beach I never really checked. They were about 10" long white cylindrical objects with a bit of fringe or roots on one end, and when they decayed enough there was an inside that looked like a grey and black puka shell necklace They were vegi enough to look a bit like a leek or limp celery, but then the rotting ones appeared to have some sort of skeleture.
