Huge and unexplained bloom has fishers racing to save their nets, and scientists hurrying to study the rare animal 
 
 A rare, tiny marine creature known as the “unicorn of the sea” has swarmed in its millions on the west coast of America, ruining fishermen’s nets and baffling scientists who are scrambling to find out more about them. 
 
 Fishers along the west coast have told researchers that in some places they are unable to catch anything because the pyrosome clusters are so dense and tightly packed. Their hooks, when pulled from the ocean, wriggle with the odd-looking creatures, which are sometimes referred to as “sea pickles” or “fire bodies”. 
 
 The distinctive animals – which are only a few millimetres long but gather in huge colonies – have washed up on popular beaches, bemusing local residents. 
 
 
 
 Olivia Blondheim, a graduate student at the University of Oregon who is part of a new research team set up to study the bloom, said: “Right now we are scrambling to learn as much as possible while we have the opportunity. 
 
 “If we continue to see this many, what impact will it have on the ecosystems here, and what economic impact on the fisheries? There are so many unknowns at this point, it really is a remarkable bloom.” 
 
 Ocean Networks 🇨🇦 (@Ocean_Networks) Typically found in the tropics, we're seeing huge numbers of #pyrosomes in the eastern Pacific. Read more https://t.co/pZ8aQHhc2A #ONCabyss pic.twitter.com/18RnlIJWmW 
 
 Pyrosomes are tubular, gelatinous creatures that are actually moving colonies of tiny organisms. Asexual creatures which reproduce by cloning themselves, they have long fascinated seafarers, who have been pictured swimming through the middle of pyrosomes up to 30 metres long. 
 
 Blondheim said no one knows how much surface area the pyrosome bloom covers, except that they have gathered right along the west coast in mammoth clusters. She said every time she or fisherman had seen them the swarm stretched “as far as the eye can see”. 
 
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 Usually found in warm, tropical seas far from the coastline, researchers have been astounded by the unexpected influx of pyrosomes along the west coast of America. It began in Oregon and gradually swept north up the coast, with reports of pyrosomes spotted as far north as Sitca, Alaska. 
 
 “There were reports of some pyrosomoes in 2014, and a few more in 2015 but this year there has been an unprecedented, insane amount,” says Blondheim. 
 
 This summer was the first time she saw a real-life pyrosome in her many years of marine study. Her mentor, Rick Brodeur, a research biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s north-west fisheries science center in Oregon, saw his first pyrosome only a couple of years ago, after a 30-year career in marine science. 
 
 “On one of our cruises we saw 60,000 in five minutes and they were ripping apart our nets,” said Blondheim. “They were glowing and floating on the surface, completely covering the sea” 
 
 Few marine scientists have seen pyrosomes in the flesh because during the day they stay in the depths, sometimes up to 700 metres under the surface and usually in the open sea. 
 
 
 
 Dr Lisa-ann Gershwin, a marine biology expert, said “gargantuan” blooms of traditionally tropical pyrosomes had occurred in unlikely places before, including in the sub-Antarctic. 
 
 “Because they aren’t wanted, and people really aren’t used to seeing them – they really do impact fisheries and catch a lot of attention,” she said. “In the case of these pyrosomes, I don’t think anyone is quite sure what has led to this bloom ... it is unusual. There is every possibility it is a natural phenomenon, but an abundance this gobsmackingly big also suggests there may be something behind it that is not natural in origin.” 
 
 Gershwin and Blondheim agreed it was worth exploring if the pyrosomes were expanding more quickly due to warming sea temperatures caused by climate change, but other options for the bloom included the animals’ diet changing or unusual sea currents. 
 
 “One of the things we are figuring out is have these guys been off the coast and we haven’t seen them? Are they moving inshore for a different reason?” said Blondheim. ||||| Hilarie Sorensen/University of Oregon 
 
 Millions of tubular sea creatures called pyrosomes have taken over the Pacific Ocean in an unprecedented bloom that has scientists baffled. 
 
 These bumpy, translucent organisms look like sea cucumbers that range in size from six inches to more than two feet long. But they’re actually made up of hundreds of tiny animals knit together with tissue into a filter-feeding cylinder. 
 
 Hilarie Sorensen/University of Oregon 
 
 And they’re everywhere, filling the waters off the West Coast all the way up to Alaska, and washing up on beaches. 
 
 One research boat caught 60,000 of them in five minutes. They’re so thick in Alaska that fishermen gave up on fishing because their hooks were coming up full of pyrosomes instead of salmon. 
 
 Jennifer Fisher, a research assistant with Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, makes regular research trips to monitor ocean conditions. She started seeing pyrosomes in her research net in February, and a GoPro camera on the net revealed an eerie underwater habitat filled with the pickle-shaped creatures. 
 
 “Basically as far as the eye can see: pyrosomes,” she said. “We were dumbfounded.” 
 
 Pyrosomes are common in the tropics, where they can reach a length of 30 feet and often glow in the dark. That likely explains their name, which in Greek translates to “fire body.” According to Fisher, they do show up in the ocean off the Northwest from time to time – but never in these numbers. 
 
 “Why they’re here now is unknown at this point,” Fisher said. “We’ve had warm ocean conditions over the past couple years, and something has brought them here. They’re just flourishing. It’s just very unusual to find them so close to shore, so evenly distributed, and so abundant.” 
 
 It’s strange, researchers say, because the warm ocean water that has been hanging out off the West Coast since 2014 has dissipated this year. And the Pacific has had plenty of warm water events in the past without seeing massive blooms of pyrosomes. 
 
 No one knows what the effects of the bloom will be, but scientists worry that if all the creatures die off at once they could sink to the seafloor and suck up all the oxygen as they’re decomposing, creating a dead zone for marine life. 
 
 Courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 
 
 Richard Brodeur, a research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is leading an effort to collect live pyrosomes to study in his lab in Newport, Oregon. 
 
 “We’re trying to learn as much as we can about these guys,” he said. “I’ve been working for a long time, and I’ve never seen one until now. So, we’re kind of catching up. … It’s really a mystery to us why this is happening.” 
 
 He wants to look at how they feed, how they orient themselves vertically in the water, and their swimming speed. 
 
 “They’re usually in the tropics farther off-shore,” he said. “People haven’t done anything experimentally with these guys.” 
 
 Brodeur said the pyrosomes might be a lingering effect of the warm water “blob” that in 2015-16 brought in unusual marine life including a tropical sea snake and red crabs. Though water temperatures have dropped from previous years, he said, “they’re still way above normal, and we’re still getting unusual things going on.” 
 
 Fisher will continue to monitor for the pyrosomes, and she’s interested to see how long they stick around. 
 
 “They often bloom in large numbers and then conditions become unfavorable for them and they go away,” she said. “I think that’s when we might learn more about why they’re here is when they leave looking at what conditions caused them to go.” ||||| The tufted puffins started washing ashore on St. Paul Island in mid-October—first a handful, then dozens, then so many that volunteers patrolling to collect dead birds began walking their four-wheelers rather than riding. It was easier than getting off every few feet. 
 
 The hundreds of dead, emaciated puffins showing up on this isolated, wind-swept scratch of land in the Pribilof Islands in the middle of the North Pacific suddenly has scientists worried—about the population of this white-masked, orange-beaked seabird, but also about what their deaths may portend for the normally productive Bering Sea. 
 
 A stretch of water that provides more seafood than any other in North America saw such record-warm temperatures earlier this year that scientists suspect the ocean food web there has shifted. That could spell big downturns for marine life, from seabirds and fur seals to salmon, crab and the $1 billion-a-year pollock fishing industry that provides flaky white filets for everything from McDonald's fish sandwiches to frozen fish sticks. 
 
 "The Bering Sea has been off-the-charts warm," said Nate Mantua, an ecologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. "We've never seen anything like this. We're in uncharted territory. We're in the midst of an extraordinary time." 
 
 In the last few years another patch of unusually warm water that settled into the Gulf of Alaska and merged with warm waters in southern California completely transformed the coastal ocean. For months, scientists off Oregon found almost none of the fatty-rich copepods that form the base of the food web. Sea lions, common murres, and Cassin's auklets died by the thousands because of a lack of food. Scores of whales and sea otters turned up dead in Alaska. The West Coast saw it's most toxic and longest-lasting harmful algal bloom ever. (Read more about this warm water blob.) 
 
 Master Predators of the Sea 
 
 But the subarctic waters of the Bering Sea, coming off a strong period of cold water and record sea-ice in 2012 and 2013, seemed mostly spared. Waters were unusually warm beginning in 2014, but not ridiculously so. Last year would have seen more normal ice, if warm water from the Gulf of Alaska hadn't poured into the Bering Sea through the Aleutian Island chain and kept the ice at bay. 
 
 But all that changed this year. Even the pool of cold water that normally rests on the bottom of the Bering Sea was at times 6 degrees Celsius warmer than usual. 
 
 "The maximum summer temperatures in the Bering Sea were the warmest we've ever seen," said Phyllis Stabeno, with NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. "And the minimum temperature—the coldest it gets in winter—was warmer than several of the last years." 
 
 Under normal cycles in the Pacific Ocean, warm water usually translates to less food, and so far that's what scientists are seeing, especially among the tiny copepods that are food for smaller fish and other animals. But it's actually worse than normal. 
 
 "When it's warm we usually no longer have a lot of large, fatty zooplankton around," Stabeno said. Instead, the sea usually includes smaller, less nutritious zooplankton. "But this year there just wasn't much of anything." 
 
 Said Janet Duffy-Anderson of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, "That bodes poorly for fish and birds and mammals. It's that zooplankton prey base that provides food for young pollock that are then eaten by birds and cod and halibut and even older pollock." 
 
 That appears to be what has happened with puffins in the remote Pribolofs. 
 
 View Images Scientists suspect the puffins are starving to death as an exceptional warm Bering Sea alters the food web, making the fish these deep-diving seabirds rely on scarce. Photograph by Paul Melovidov 
 
 Mass Deaths 
 
 In early October, Lauren Divine, co-director of the ecosystem conservation office for St. Paul's Aleut community, was given two dead puffins to take back to Anchorage for research. At the time she though little of it. On this 40-square-mile island, of roughly 500 people, dead birds wash up once in awhile. 
 
 But within a few days it was obvious something was wrong. 
 
 "On the 17th we started doing surveys of the two main beaches and we came up with about 40 birds that first day," said volunteer Aaron Lestenkof. "Since then it's been about 20 to 30 birds each time we go out." 
 
 Several hundred birds have now washed up, nearly 200 times the normal rate. And since St. Paul and its rocky sister island, St. George, are the only land masses anywhere nearby, scientists are certain they're seeing just a tiny fraction of the deaths. 
 
 "In 10 years of monitoring, we've only seen six puffins wash in—total," said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington professor who coordinates a West Coast volunteer bird-monitoring network. "Now we've seen nearly 250 in 20 days. And these islands are small dots in the middle of a huge ocean. The entire puffin population is only 6,000 birds, and we project half that many may be affected." 
 
 Parrish said the birds—deep-diving fish eaters that chow on forage fish, such as baby walleye pollock—aren't sick. Scientists see no evidence of disease. The animals are just in such an advanced state of starvation "they appear to be eating themselves inside out." Even if she wasn't already aware of the last two years of bird die-off events along the West Coast and Alaska, she said, this is unusual enough to be worrisome. 
 
 Puffins have seen trouble before. One year after the unusually warm 2012, Atlantic puffins in the Gulf of Maine suffered their worst reproductive season ever—until this year. Breeding of puffins in Iceland has been collapsing for a decade. But along the Pacific adults are simply washing up dead. 
 
 "Clearly something very weird is going on," Parrish said. "It's basically every year now we're getting some huge mass-mortality event. It seems that the bottom-up changes provoked by the atmosphere are creating massive, massive changes in marine ecosystems. And the forage fish that everything depends on are taking it in the shorts." 
 
 What does that mean for the rest of the creatures in the ocean? 
 
 "We don't know," Parrish said. "The Bering Sea is an incredibly big place, and we're just seeing this now." (Learn how puffins are tougher than they look.) 
 
 Iceland Puffin Threatened December 5, 2008—In Iceland's remote Westman Islands, warming weather is threatening a beloved mascot: the Atlantic puffin. 
 
 
 
 
 
 What’s Causing the Warmth? 
 
 Mantua said the strange behavior in the atmosphere that helped the Gulf of Alaska's warm "blob" form in 2013 shifted again late this spring, with a high-pressure system setting up over the entire North Pacific. That led to an extended warm period across Alaska from May through September. 
 
 Then, in October, the patterns changed again, with significant storms in the Gulf of Alaska. But in the Bering Sea wind brought warm air and water from out of the south. 
 
 "These patterns in the atmosphere are big," he said. "They span much of the North Pacific and can create warm or cold patches at the same time. But it's the fact that there has been so much persistence in these patterns that has led to such extraordinary ocean temperatures. That, to me, is the big mystery. We just keep going from one extreme to another. If you get 10 or 12 days that are stuck in the same pattern, then the ocean is going to slowly build up heat." 
 
 Scientists are still grappling with trying to determine how much of this change is likely linked to climate change. Some have argued that melting sea ice has affected the jet stream, causing it to be more wobbly. Others have suggested these strange anomalies are connected to warmth in the tropics but are largely just extreme versions of normal climate fluctuations. 
 
 Regardless, for now, marine scientists are planning to spend extra time at sea, trying to assess what all this means for the North Pacific—particularly for Alaska's fishing industry, which supplies half the nation's catch of seafood.
– They are called "unicorns of the sea" and they are infesting the Pacific Coast, destroying fishing nets and puzzling scientists, the Guardian reports. The tiny blob-like creatures are infesting some stretches of the West Coast as far north as Alaska so badly that fishermen can't catch anything. The translucent tubular invaders are pyrosomes, and while they generally range in size from a few inches to 2 feet, they band together in huge colonies. (See video.) They rip nets and clog hooks, and wash up on beaches to the consternation of the locals. One researcher began spotting the "sea pickles" in nets in February and since then, the numbers have exploded, per Oregon Public Broadcasting. One research boat captured 60,000 within minutes. "They were glowing and floating on the surface, completely covering the sea," says University of Oregon researcher Hilarie Sorensen. The creatures—their Greek name means "fire bodies"—prefer the tropics, but even there, they haven't been seen in the "insane" numbers of this year's bloom, says Sorensen. The impact of the little cucumbers is unknown, but there is concern their massive presence could foul ecosystems. While the bloom could be a natural phenomenon, Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin says "an abundance this gobsmackingly big" indicates something fishy may be going on. Warming seas could be a possible explainer, or perhaps changes in the marine food supply or shifting currents. (Killer whales are also tormenting Alaskan fishermen.)