A blue dragon, a rare sea slug with a painful sting, washed up on a Texas beach recently.
The small, about 1-inch, creature is small but severe. It's a predator of the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish, Padre Island National Seashore officials said on social media.
“If you see a dragon in the park, be amazed as they are a rare find, but also keep your distance,” park officials said.
Here there be dragons! A blue dragon, a type of nudibranch or sea slug, was found in the park this weekend. Blue...
Posted by Padre Island National Seashore on Wednesday, May 6, 2020
After a blue dragon consumes a man-of-war jellyfish, the stinging cells from the man-of-war move to the end of the dragon’s “fingers.” The concentration of stinging cells can be much more painful than a man-of-war’s, park officials said.
Although fearsome, they are not common.
"It's pretty rare," David Hicks, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley director for the School of Marine Sciences, told KVEO. "We don't see a lot of them but they are reported from Texas, that community of organisms they kind of go around in masses of water, if you see one you see 1,000 of them."
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