There were many small and microscopic creatures in the sea. The seawater looked clean and clear, but in fact, if someone drank a mouthful of seawater, they might end up in their stomach.
Most of these creatures were harmless to healthy people, but there were always exceptions.
The thing that Zhang Zian picked up was too small, about the size of a grain of rice. At first, he thought it was a small insect on land that was attracted by the smell of the seaweed, so it landed on the seaweed to look for food like a moth to a flame. However, when he looked at it carefully under the sunlight, he noticed that the body structure of this "insect" was quite special. It didn't look like an insect on land, but more like some kind of crustacean in the water, such as a shrimp or something else.
More detailed things had to be seen with the help of a magnifying glass or a microscope.
Ke Shaohui saw his movements and laughed. "What good thing did you pick up?"
"What is this? Do you know it? Is it a shrimp? "Zhang Zian held the shrimp in a paper towel and handed it to Ke Shaohui.
This thing was too small. Zhang Zian had put it almost in front of his eyes to barely see its outline. He was embarrassed to directly put his hand in front of the creature's eyes.
Ke Shaohui's eyesight was not bad, but he still couldn't see what it looked like from a distance. He used to be a sailor and had a rough personality. He stretched out two fingers and wanted to pick it up and put it in front of his eyes.
Zhang Zian felt that it was a bit inappropriate. It was obviously not a wise move to touch an unknown creature. However, it was too small, and he had never heard of any shrimp that was poisonous, so he hesitated and did not stop it.
As a result, when Ke Shaohui had just picked it up, his facial muscles suddenly twitched, and he took a deep breath.
"F * ck! This thing … f * cking bit me! "
He subconsciously swung his hand to get rid of it, but he regretted it as soon as he shook it off. It was too small, and when it fell to the ground, it was mixed into the mud and could not be found.
"Where did I shake it off?"
He jumped from the tire to the ground and bent down to look for it.
"Forget it. Don't look for it. Is your hand okay?" Zhang Zian asked.
Ke Shaohui looked down at his hand. On the tip of his right index finger, there was a half-grain sized wound that was oozing blood.
"F * ck? This little thing is so fierce? "
He stared at his fingers in disbelief.
After all, he used to be a seaman on a ship. He often had to go out to sea for half a year. Life on the sea was not as delicate as that of a piggy girl. The seamen all lived very rough lives. In addition to working with engines, ropes, moorings, and railings all day long, every seaman's palms were very rough.
A few years ago, he retired from the navy and entered the Fishery Administration. The things he often touched changed from ropes to keyboards. The calluses on his fingers had been smoothed out, but they were still much rougher than ordinary people's fingers. Even so, when he met the little thing, he was bitten and bled.
If it had bitten any other part of his body, he might not have reacted so fiercely and directly flung it away, but the fingers were connected to the heart.
"What is that? Why was he so fierce? You're biting me the moment you come up! " He looked at Zhang Zian in horror because he couldn't see anything clearly. At least, Zhang Zian could see more clearly than him.
Zhang Zian also looked at his finger and shook his head. "It's hard to say. It could be some kind of shrimp, or it could be something else."
"Shrimp?"
Ke Shaohui was stunned. "Shrimp bite?"
This was something he had never heard of in his many years as a seaman.
"I don't know, but the sea is so vast. There are always species of creatures that humans don't know about." Zhang Zian didn't hastily jump to a conclusion. "Right, has the Fishery Administration Department received any similar reports recently, such as tourists or citizens being bitten at the beach?"
"This …" Ke Shaohui thought about it awkwardly. "Even if there is such a thing, we should probably ask the hospital. Unless it's a big deal, I'm afraid we'll be the last to know …"
That was true. The Fishery Administration had a wide range of jurisdiction, but because it was too wide, there was no way to be very detailed. If someone was bitten by such a creature at the beach, if it was serious, they would go to the hospital to treat the wound and then go home. Basically, no one would consciously report it to the Fishery Administration Department.
"You suspect that there are a lot of those things in the sea?" Ke Shaohui asked.
"There must be a lot of them. Such small creatures must live in large groups to survive. I was born in Binhai City, and I've never heard of such little things biting people at the beach. They should be attached to seaweed and were blown from the ocean by the typhoon. "Zhang Zian nodded.
"Then … what should we do?" Ke Shaohui's face looked like he was constipated. First it was the typhoon, then the seaweed, and now the mysterious biting bugs. If this continued, the Fishery Administration Department would have to resign.
One bug could bite through his rough fingers. If it was a group of these bugs … He didn't dare to think further.
What should he do?
The simplest way was, of course, to prohibit citizens and tourists from swimming in the sea. However, once this decision was announced, it would definitely cause an uproar. People wouldn't believe that it was a biting bug that was causing trouble. Instead, they would speculate that there was some terrible danger in the sea. From nuclear fuel leaks to the appearance of Godzilla, people were always delusional in this area.
Zhang Zian plucked a handful of seaweed and carefully observed it in his palm.
As a pet industry worker, he was good at identifying animals related to pets. He wasn't good at identifying plants, unless he had done his homework. For example, before entering the Mahogany Forest, he had studied which plants in the Mahogany Forest were edible. However, as a child who grew up by the sea, he had some understanding of seaweeds. He could recognize that this was seaweed from the genus Enteromorpha.
The genus Enteromorpha was a general term for a large group of seaweeds. It included more than 40 species of seaweeds. As for which species of Enteromorpha the seaweed in his hand belonged to, he couldn't tell.
Ocean pollution, deterioration of water quality, and explosive growth of algae often formed red tides, which led to the death of a large number of marine organisms. They were also known as red ghosts.
Not all red tides were red. There were also green tides formed by the outbreak of green algae. One of the typical representatives was Enteromorpha.
Recognizing that this was Enteromorpha reminded Zhang Zian of a piece of news he had read before. Because that piece of news was quite incredible, and it was also about a certain kind of shrimp that could bite people, it left a deep impression on him. It was the first time he had heard that shrimp could bite people.
In August 2017, an Australian 16-year-old boy felt his leg muscles were sore after playing football in the afternoon, so he ran to the beach and put his calf into the sea to soak his feet.
This was not the first time he had done this. He and his friends had been swimming in the same place almost every day, and nothing had ever happened.
However, about half an hour later, when he lifted his feet out of the sea, he was horrified to find that his feet were densely covered in small wounds from the middle of his calf down. They had been bitten into a bloody mess, and there was almost no intact skin left.
When he soaked his feet, he felt a little tingling, but he thought it was a normal reaction caused by the contact with the cool seawater. After all, it was winter in the southern hemisphere.
After he was sent to the hospital, the doctor could not tell what had bitten him.
In order to find the truth, his father came to the same beach again and put the raw meat into the sea. When he picked it up again, he found a group of small, bloodthirsty crustaceans. After identification, it seemed to be some kind of glass hook shrimp.
This kind of dangerous glass hook shrimp did not only exist in the southern hemisphere. As early as 2007, there were records of more than one citizen being bitten by them on the Shandong Peninsula. It was certain that this kind of glass hook shrimp would wander in the sea with the seaweed and would not be too far away from the seaweed.
In adventure novels, people often described the Army Ants as magical, saying that a group of Army Ants could eat a living person into a skeleton in an instant. This was, of course, an exaggeration. Living people were not stupid. Who would stand there and wait to be eaten by the Army Ants?
This kind of bloodthirsty glass hook shrimp was like the Army Ants in the sea. People could not run in the sea at will. It should be very dangerous to encounter a group of glass hook shrimp while swimming, but normal people would not swim in a large area of seaweed, right? The probability of drowning in seaweed was much higher than the probability of dying from being bitten by the glass hook shrimp.
Therefore, generally speaking, this kind of glass hook shrimp and human beings did not interfere with each other. There were not many cases of people being bitten, at least not many reported cases. They were too small, and their bodies were translucent, which made their movements very hidden. If you were bitten while swimming in the sea, you would not be able to see anything in the sea, and you would not think that it was some kind of small shrimp that bit you.
Zhang Zian told everything he knew to Ke Shaohui and comforted him. "As long as no one is courting death by swimming in a large area of seaweed, there should be no big problems. We don't need to take any special measures to avoid panic. At most, we can put up a few signs on the beach where the seaweed appears, warning citizens and tourists not to swim in the sea. Otherwise, they may be entangled by the seaweed and cause danger."
Ke Shaohui nodded and breathed a sigh of relief. What he was most worried about was making a big fuss. Whether or not people were injured or even killed because of this, the Fishery Administration Department would be the unlucky one. If a few signs could solve the problem, that would be the best.
"This is just a temporary solution. The real way to solve the problem is to wait for the monsoon to come and blow the seaweed back into the deep sea. If we're lucky, it might start to wind in a few days," Zhang Zian added.
"I hope so." Ke Shaohui sighed. "They really know how to make trouble for the Fishery Administration … Then I'll leave first. After I transport the seaweed to the place, I'll get a few more signs and put them up on all the beaches that have seaweed."
Zhang Zian suddenly thought of Welder Zhao and Electrician Wu and asked, "Wait a minute. South of us, is there a beach? Is someone digging for mole shrimp there? "
"Yes, there is such a big beach," Ke Shaohui confirmed. "What about that beach?"
"Uh … Is there a large area of seaweed in the sea near that beach?" Zhang Zian asked.
"Yes, that area is one of the areas with the densest seaweed. A large amount of seaweed has exploded, and the mole shrimp, big razor clams, and so on have all been fattened by the seaweed. There are indeed people catching shrimp there." Ke Shaohui smiled embarrassedly. "To tell you the truth, my colleague used to be a shrimp catcher there, but he's been too busy recently, so he hasn't been able to go …"
Zhang Zian was speechless.
Other people catching shrimp there might just be shrimp, but as long as there was a possibility of danger, once Welder Zhao went there, there would definitely be danger.
He even suspected that Welder Zhao was a superpower person who was able to increase the probability of danger, which was close to zero, to one …
As soon as he thought about it, his phone rang. The caller was Electrician Wu.
Ke Shaohui saw it and waved goodbye to him. He gestured to indicate that they would keep in touch in the future, then returned to the car and drove away.
"Hello? Master Wu, did something happen to Master Zhao? "He picked up the phone.
Before Electrician Wu could speak, Welder Zhao's voice, which sounded like a pig being slaughtered, came from the other side of the phone.
"Cough! Don't mention it! "
Electrician Wu briefly explained what had happened.
It turned out that the two of them had calculated the time of low tide. When they arrived at the beach, the tide was already low, so they parked their electric scooter by the shore and carried their tools to fish for the big mole shrimp.
Welder Zhao had heard about how to fish for shrimp from other fishermen, but he was a person who thought he had mastered it after listening to a few words. He confidently walked into the beach after the tide had gone down, but in reality, it was not that simple at all.
To fish for the big mole shrimp, one had to first use a shovel to shovel away a layer of sand on the beach. After shoveling away the sand, if there was a hole underneath, one had to stick a bamboo stick or something similar into the water. If the bamboo stick moved, it meant that there was a big mole shrimp in the hole. Next, one had to stick a brush into the hole.
The big mole shrimp was a neat freak, so it would clean up any foreign objects in the hole. If it thought that the brush was a foreign object, it would push the brush out. As it was pushed, it would pop its head out of the hole. At that time, one just had to be quick enough to catch it.
It seemed simple, but the timing was not so easy to grasp.
Welder Zhao was impatient. He had boasted that he would catch ten pounds of big mole shrimp that day, but a few of them had clearly popped out of the hole and then retreated. He could not help but throw away the brush and stick his arm into the hole full of water to fish for the shrimp.
He took out a few fat mole shrimp in a row and laughed at Electrician Wu, who was fishing for shrimp with the brush, for being too stupid. Unexpectedly, when he stuck his arm into the water to fish for shrimp again, he did not manage to fish for any shrimp, but his hand was stung instead.
He thought that the shrimp had used its pincers to pinch him, so he did not care and continued to fish deeper. However, the hole was a little twisted, and his hand was stuck.
Immediately after, he felt a stabbing pain in his palm and forearm, but it was not very painful. He was still wondering what was going on.
When he finally pulled his arm out of the hole, he found that his palm and forearm were covered in blood. There were also a lot of translucent bugs hanging on his skin, not letting go. They were densely packed.
The visual impact was far more frightening than the pain on his skin. He was so scared that he screamed, and Electrician Wu almost had a heart attack from the shock.
Electrician Wu was also dumbfounded when he saw his arm. He left his tools where they were and pulled Welder Zhao towards the electric scooter by the sea. He planned to take him to the hospital, and he called Zhang Zian as he ran.
Zhang Zian sighed after listening. It was just a flesh wound this time, so there would not be any danger. However, if Welder Zhao continued like this, the rest of his life would be filled with passion and adventure.
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