Dog walker spots rare — and ‘highly venomous’ — sea creature on beach in Australia

Along the coast of western Australia, the waves drummed a steady beat. Dianne Bennett had spent a lot of time walking along the reefs and knew the soundtrack well.

But a colorful — and dangerous — surprise awaited her.

“I was walking my dogs in an intertidal area at a very low tide when I found it,” Bennett told McClatchy News on Feb. 24. On the beach in Broome, she spotted a writhing, purple sea creature.

“My first thought was, ‘There’s a weird bunch of eels going down a hole,’” Bennett told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Bennett had stumbled on a rare and “highly venomous” species of sea anemone: Dofleinia armata, also known as the armed anemone or striped anemone, she wrote in a Feb. 11 Facebook post.

Photos show the armed anemone’s knot-like body and mass of tentacles.

“This species is one of the largest and certainly the most dangerous Australian anemone,” scientists with the Queensland Museum wrote in a 2004 report. “Contact with this species produces extremely painful wounds which may take one to several months to heal.”

The body of an armed anemone can reach about 8 inches across and its tentacles can reach almost 20 inches long, the scientists said. Often, the animal curls into a ball, hiding its mouth and obscuring its full size.

Zoe Richards, a marine invertebrate curator with the Western Australian Museum, has “only seen (an armed anemone) one time on my surveys. They’re definitely out there, but they’re not common,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“I didn’t at the time realize how unusual this anemone is,” Bennett told McClatchy News.

“It looks like a pile of snakes at first glance,” one Facebook user commented on Bennett’s post about the armed anemone.

“I thought this was toothpaste,” another user wrote.

“The marine environment is like another world, you never know what you’re going to stumble across,” Bennett told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Broome is along the northwestern coast of Australia and on the opposite side of the continent from Sydney.

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