A Melbourne teenager has gone for a dip at the beach and come out covered in blood and looking like a horror movie extra.
When Sam Kanizay, 16, felt sore after football on Saturday, he decided to soak his legs at Dendy Street Beach in Brighton.
Half an hour later, he walked out covered in what his family said were tiny marine creatures eating his legs.
“I was icing my legs for about half an hour, waist-deep,” Sam told 3AW.
“(I couldn’t feel anything) because the cold water basically numbed my legs, I felt what I thought was pins and needles.”
Sam said he walked home from the beach and had a shower, which is when he “started to feel it a bit”.
“We’ve had a few people just guessing that it was sea lice … but there was no real evidence to say what it was.”
Sam’s dad Jarrod Kanizay said staff members at the hospital were at a loss to explain what had happened.
“They’ve called a number of people, whether it’s toxicity experts or marine experts and other medics around Melbourne at least … (and) yep, no one (knows),” he told AAP.
But Jeff Weir, the executive director of the Dolphin Research Institute, said he suffered a similar experience while on a night dive under the Portsea Pier taking photographs.
The marine biologist said the culprit was likely to be a type of amphipod — an order of shrimp-like crustaceans.
“It was very cold, probably, about this time of year, and when I got out of the water I realised my forehead was bleeding and parts of my cheeks were bleeding,” he said.
They’d crawled in under my wetsuit hood and into my beard and chewed away, very similar to what happened to this young lad.”
Mr Weir said Sam’s case was one of the most extreme he’d ever heard about, but it was not uncommon for divers who remained stationary for long periods to be targeted.
