The toe-chomping critters seem to be unusually numerous and hungry at the moment.
Beachgoers in Southern California are being targeted by swarms of tiny, aggressive sea bugs, previously dubbed"mini-sharks," that seem to have a thing for feet. The shrimplike creatures have been snapping at the ankles of locals promenading along the shoreline, leaving people hopping around in pain, according to local news reports.
"I had blood all over my foot and in between my toes," Sauvage said."It was like small piranhas had bit me." But after she rinsed off her feet with water the pain subsided within 15 to 20 minutes, she added. Isopods belong to an order of woodlouse-resembling crustaceans that include more than 10,000 marine, freshwater and terrestrial species. They range in size from tiny critters like E. chiltoni to massive 10-inch monsters that roam the seafloor.
"They can be pretty nasty when they get going," Richard Brusca, an invertebrate zoologist at the University of Arizona and a former curator of crustaceans at the San Diego Natural History Museum, told the Los Angeles Times in 1993."They're like mini-sharks" that can attack you"like a wolf pack" but with a bite comparable to that of a mosquito, he added.
The isopods' ability to quickly gnaw their way through flesh has caused problems in some fish farms where caged fish are unable to shake off the parasites. The ravenous crustaceans can also create issues for forensic pathologists, making it difficult for experts to identify the bodies of drowning victims, according to the website Biodiversity of the Central Coast, a digital field guide to the biodiversity of British Columbia, Canada, maintained by the University of Victoria.
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