Fisherman finds bizarre deep-sea creature at Phuket

Fisherman Tirawat Sawangsuk at first thought it was a dried ball of seaweed or coral, but then his bycatch suddenly started to move. So he pulled the unknown creature out of the fishing net to get a closer look on his boat.

The footage (video above) shows the bizarre creature with the slimy, quivering tentacles branching out of its body. “I was confused and scared. I didn’t know what it was and I don’t know if it was poisonous or not,” Sawansuk said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it”
“I’ve been a fisherman all my life, but I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the fisherman. Being superstitious, he threw the animal back into the sea, fearing the capture would bode ill. “I’ve heard stories about creatures from the bottom of the sea, but this is the first time I’ve found one,” Sawansuk said.

The ‘tentacle monster’ was a gorogon head (also called jellyfish head, ed.), a brittle star species that specializes in catching plankton. The strange nocturnal creatures (pictured below), akin to starfish, usually sit on sponges, hard corals, soft or fire corals, extending their heavily branched, ruffled arms into the current.

The plankton that has been filtered out is registered with a tick. From time to time the arms are then bent forward and put in the mouth. During the day, the gorgon heads, who are at home in all seven seas, huddle in shelters and congregate in a disorderly tangle of arms.

Named after characters from Greek mythology
Large gorgon heads can have a diameter of up to one and a half meters. The animals are very colorful. The animals are named after the gorgonians, snake-haired creatures from Greek mythology, and the gorgon Medusa, whose head was chopped off by Perseus, son of the god Zeus.