A Night-Time Hunt for the Creature Known as The Thing
By: Walt Stearns
There are a lot of things still waiting to be discovered in the underwater world, and you don't necessarily need a research vessel and a scientific team to run across the unknown. This was certainly the case when I took the first known photographs of one of the Caribbean's storied sea monsters. I was staying at the Anse Chastanet Resort on the island of Saint Lucia, which is located midway down the Caribbean’s Windward Island chain. It was there that I heard about a mysterious reef monster.
I enjoy island tales as much as the next guy, but this one seemed especially improbable. The local dive masters told of worm-like creature supposedly 15 feet in length and as big around as a man’s arm. Known simply as “The Thing,” it was considered to be extremely elusive, and it only came out at night. It was also said to be especially sensitive to dive lights. In one dive master’s words, “Man, lights make it snap back into its holes faster than a rubber band.
Never one to pass up a good mystery, no matter how improbable it might seem, I planned a few night dives on the reefs around Anse Chastanet. Much to my surprise, I found that The Thing really did exist, and I was even able to get a picture of it!
It was a fairly small specimen compared to what the dive masters had described - about four feet in length and as thick as my wrist. But it didn’t recoil from the light. Maybe it was sick. Excited by my discovery, I passed a few images onto my good friend Paul Humann. He was working on the second revision of his and Ned Deloach’s Reef Creature Identification book, so I figured if anyone could, Paul could identify it.
As it turned out, this was a new species, never before identified. The best any of the scientists were able to determine was that it belongs to the Phylum Annelida, meaning little rings, which is a term applied to most segmented worms. “Common earthworms, as well as many marine worms are members of this phylum,” according to Paul.
This group’s most distinguishing characteristic is that their body is divided into a repetitive sequence of round segments. This marine variety of Annelids (worms) is known as Polychaetes. An example would be the bearded fireworm, commonly called a bristle worm. On the creature I found, the body segments were a dark to reddish/purple brown with a pearl-like tint, separated by deep creases with large cirri, which are the appendages used for locomotion. The animal's feather-shaped gills were soft to the touch (yes, I touched one), running down both sides. It looked sort of like a centipede.
The identification of the Thing is tentative, as more taxonomic research needs to be done once viable specimens or tissue samples are obtained. The problem is not only that they are they nocturnal, they are still considered extremely rare. The photos I took still remain among a tiny handful of known images on record, with a few later taken over on Saint Lucia’s neighbor, the island of Dominica. Beyond that, there have only been a handful of sightings from the Bahamas, down to Bonaire and Curacao in the southern Caribbean.
For the moment, all anyone can say is that it belongs to the Family of elongated worms Eunicidae, giving rise to its genies species name: Eunice roussaei. And that it inhabits deep recesses in the reef, and can grow up to six feet in length. The last part is speculative since scientists are really not sure how big this animal grows. Who knows, there may be a 15-foot monster out there on the reef. It may be you who will find it.
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