The Fanged, Faceless Sea Creature of Texas City After Hurricane Harvey (2017)

Late August 2017. Hurricane Harvey made landfall. By the Thursday before her visit, the rains had stopped. Preeti Desai, a science communicator and the National Audubon Society's social media manager, came to Texas to record Harvey's effects on bird habitats. On a Tuesday morning she visited the rookery islands off Galveston. The following day she toured sites of Audubon Texas's TERN program with its lead, Kari Howard.

Wednesday, 6 September 2017. A beach in Texas City, about 15 miles from Galveston. On that beach she saw Black Skimmers and Royal Terns. Then something else. "I spotted this a couple yards away," Desai said later. "It was completely unexpected…" It was a bloated carcass of a creature she could not identify. Long. Eel-like. Large, fang-like teeth. And, it seemed, no face at all.

She first wondered whether it was a sea lamprey, "but when I saw its face, I knew there was no way it was." She put its length at maybe 2 to 2.5 feet at most. A drinking straw beside the tail in her photo gave the scale. She photographed it. She left it where it lay. She did not tell local authorities. She wanted, she told the BBC, to "let nature take its course."

That day she posted the pictures. "Okay, biology twitter, what the heck is this?? Found on a beach in Texas City, TX. #wildlifeid" Fox News counted more than 4,000 retweets and more than 10,000 likes. Guesses arrived. A gulper eel. A bloated moray. A blacktail moray. An alien.

Andrew Thaler, a marine science consultant, replied with something closer. "Hard to tell given position and decomposition, but teeth and body shape makes me think some kind of eel."

Kenneth Tighe, an eel specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, studied the photos for Earth Touch News. His best match was Aplatophis chauliodus, the fangtooth or tusky snake-eel. He also named Bathyuroconger vicinus and Xenomystax congroides. "All three of these species occur off Texas and have large fang-like teeth." The deciding clue was missing. "Too bad you can't clearly see the tip of the tail."

Ben Frable, collection manager of fishes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, reached the same conclusion. Adam Summers also called it a tusky eel. Steven Murawski of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg urged caution. "It is unclear how big the specimen is, and that is important here." The fangtooth snake-eel lives in burrows about 30 to 90 m down, from the Gulf of Mexico to French Guiana and northeastern Brazil. Alive, it waits with "only snout and eyes exposed, darting to feed on other fishes and crustaceans."

The accepted story is simple. Rough winds and strong currents from the recent storms most likely carried a burrowing eel onto the shore. Its eyes probably dried out in the sun early in decomposition. That left the faceless look. Questions remain. Nobody examined the carcass, so the identification was never confirmed. These eels often live in shallow water, IBTimes noted, so Harvey's role is uncertain. Audubon said the storm may have driven it ashore, "but this cannot be confirmed." Local fishermen, by one account, suggested a spoon-nose eel instead.

The press called it a monster. Fox News called it a "demon fish". Desai pushed back. It wasn't frightening, she wrote, it wasn't colossal, and it wasn't a monster. People may fear unknown things, she suggested, because they are "disconnected from nature." Today Wikipedia's article on the species carries a section on the find, under a name that stuck: the "Texas sea monster".