These weird as hell sea creatures look like pickles and are bad news for fishers

Straight from your nightmares to the beach
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
These weird as hell sea creatures look like pickles and are bad news for fishers
This week's "bizarre sea creature of the week"! Credit: Shutterstock / Timothy Ewing

Because the ocean doesn't hold enough mysteries -- like, say, the "peanut worm" that looks like a penis -- there's a new, bizarre thing floating en masse in the Pacific Ocean.

This one looks like a pickle.

These ocean pickles (otherwise known as "pyrosomes") are usually found in tropical zones but this spring, for some reason, they've swarmed the Pacific Northwest coast.

Besides looking like gelatinous pickles, the pyrosomes are also creating a nuisance by clogging up research nets and glomming on to fish hooks.

Their presence is baffling lots of researchers, although a report from National Geographic says that the tunicates began multiplying as water temperatures in "The Blob" -- a big mass of record-warm water along the Pacific coast of North America -- finally cooled.

NatGeo suggest that the giant toxic algae bloom that formed in "The Blob" could have something to do with the pyrosomes new-found empire, but no one really knows for sure.

While we wait for more answers about the pyrosomes and why the hell they're everywhere along the Pacific Coast right now, check out this nightmarish scene found by a researcher off the Oregon coast.

I, for one, welcome our new pyrosome overlords.

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Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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