Mtunzini residents were curious last week after a large trail of glass fibre-like shards littered the beach sand in the uMlalazi Nature Reserve.
Hard and brittle to the touch, it was eventually determined that these were the shells of hundreds of thousands of marine pteropods (‘wing-footed’) creatures called sea butterflies.
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These pelagic swimming sea snails can differ in size from just a couple of millimetres to a few centimetres and spend their whole lives floating among the plankton as part of a vital food chain.
According to marine biologist Fiona Mackay at the Oceanographic Research Institute, it was unusual to see so many had washed up.
‘I’ve only seen it once before, on the south coast,’ she said.
There was no evidence of sightings on any other beaches along the coast.
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