Hundreds Of 'Sea Pickles' Wash Up Along Oregon Coast

If you happen to be on an Oregon beach this week, you might find something strange and squishy. "Sea pickles" are washing up again on the coast of the Beaver State, but it's not just a handful. Reports are saying "hundreds" are appearing on beaches.

“They don’t really look like your typical fish or sea star or dog or cat. They’re just these round tubes,” Tiffany Boothe with the Seaside Aquarium told KOIN. “It looks like plastic, for the most part.”

They're actually called pyrosomes, and people like to call them sea pickles. Composed of a bunch of tiny organisms called zooids, pyrosomes typically float through ocean currents and consume microscopic plankton along the way.

While it's not unusual for these transparent and bioluminescent creatures to be here, what's startling are recent reports. KOIN says people are finding many pyrosome colonies along the coast. According to scientists, pyrosomes are supposed to reside in tropical waters, not the colder climates of the Pacific Northwest.

“We’ve been getting some really big storms, especially from the south. So the pyrosomes, while they are found off the Oregon coast in the summer months, usually in the winter we won’t see them unless we get these big, big winter storms,” Boothe explains.

If you want to check out these "sea pickles," Boothe recommends you head to the Southern Oregon coast. They're safe to pick up and touch but don't take them home.