Mystery Fanged Sea Creature Washes Up on Texas Beach after Hurricane Harvey

A walk along Texas City beach took an unexpected turn for Preeti Desai when she stumbled over a creature that normally swims well below the surface washed ashore during Hurricane Harvey.

Desai posted a picture of the fanged sea creature on Twitter in the hope that someone could identify it: “Okay, biology twitter, what the heck is this?? Found on a beach in Texas City, TX,” she wrote on September 6.

One respondent, Adam Summers, a professor at the University of Washington and the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, said that the creature was identifiable due to the “remnant of skin coloration, the body and head shape, the teeth and the shape of the jaw they are in.”

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While the creature at first sight appeared to have no eyes, Summers pointed out that they had actually just decayed. 

Summers credited Ben Frable, at U.C. San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography, with identifying the fish as a fangtooth snake-eel. Fable wasn’t sure whether Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas on August 25, was to blame for bringing the creature to the beach. “They live in shallow water sometimes. And wash up on beaches even without storms,” Fable wrote.

According to biologist and eel specialist Dr Kenneth Tighe, there’s a high probability the animal is a fangtooth snake-eel, but it could also be a garden or conger eel. “All three of these species occur off Texas and have large fang-like teeth,” he told the BBC.

The fangtooth snake-eel, also known as aplatophis chauliodus or “tusky” eel, is usually found in waters between 30 and 90 metres deep in the western Atlantic ocean. It feeds itself on small fish and crustaceans and can reach 33 inches in length.

Other Twitter users agreed that, whatever the name of the animal, it is the stuff of nightmares.

Creatures of all kinds were affected by the strong hurricanes that battered the southern U.S. in recent weeks.

Numerous animals were stranded when Hurricane Irma lashed Florida last week, including two manatees marooned in Florida’s Sarasota Bay and later rescued by a group of people.

Florida residents were at least spared any encounters with alligators, who were confined to Gatorland in Orlando to avoid posing any risk to humans.

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Facebook removes feature that let ads reach ‘Jew haters’

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc (FB.O) this week stopped advertisers from targeting messages to people interested in topics such as “Jew haters” and “how to burn Jews” after journalists inquired about it, the news organization ProPublica reported on Thursday.

ProPublica, a nonprofit outlet based in New York, said it found the topics in Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform and paid $30 to test them with its own content. Another category it found was “History of ‘why Jews ruin the world.’”

The anti-Semitic categories were created by an algorithm rather than by people, ProPublica reported. Some 2,300 people had expressed interest in them.

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, said in a statement that it had removed the ability to buy targeted marketing based on those topics and believed the use of the topics in ad campaigns had not been widespread.

Along with Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, Facebook dominates the fast-growing market for online advertising, in part because it lets marketers target their ads based on huge volumes of data.

Facebook, though, has had difficulty ensuring that advertisers on its self-service system comply with its terms and conditions.

Last year, ProPublica reported that Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude users by race when running housing or other ads, despite a prohibition on such ads under the U.S. Fair Housing Act 1969.

Facebook last week said an operation likely based in Russia spent $100,000 on thousands of U.S. ads promoting social and political messages over a two-year period through May, fueling concerns about foreign meddling in U.S. elections. [nL2N1LN261]

The company said it shut down 470 “inauthentic” accounts as part of an internal investigation into those ads.

The anti-Semitic targeting categories likely were generated because people listed those themes on their Facebook profiles as an interest, an employer or field of study, ProPublica reported.

Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook, said in a statement on Thursday that sometimes content appears on the network that “violates our standards.”

“In this case,” he went on, “we’ve removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”

Facebook said it was considering other changes to its advertising platform, such as adding more reviews of targeting categories before they show up in the self-service platform.

Reporting by David Ingram; Editing by David Gregorio

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