Tubular Oddity Back on Oregon Coast: Here's What They Are

Published 12/08/24 at 9:15 p.m.
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Yachats, Oregon) – Theyyyy're baaack.....

It seems those kooky little sea pickles have returned to the Oregon coast, sometimes in sizable numbers. Reports from social media have been drifting in periodically for the last couple of weeks, and some of the sightings were Seaside. (Photo Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium)

More often known as pyrosomes, they caused a stir back in 2016 – 17 when tons of them hit Oregon and Washington beaches. It was unprecedented numbers, outpaced only by the on-and-off appearance of velella velella when they would flood the coastline over the last two decades.

They are again causing some minor confusion, although by now more beachgoers know about them than don't, after the large, famous runs last decade. Still, an abundance of questions about them have hit the internet, including after Seaside Aquarium referenced them in a recent post.

The aquarium's Tiffany Boothe has encountered lots of them in the past.

Photo Tiffany Boothe, Seaside Aquarium

“I know they were seeing them down south. I had a few people send me photographs asking me to identify them,” Boothe said. “I was out of town for the week but when I got back I saw quite a few small chunks of older ones.”

A wide variety of locales have chimed in: Yachats, Newport, Rockaway Beach, Harris Beach at Brookings and Bandon's Devil's Kitchen, among them.

So what are the pyrosomes?

“Commonly referred to as sea pickles, Pyrosomes are actually colonies of multi-celled animals called zooids. These colonies range in size depending on their particular species, with some being up to 30 feet long,” the aquarium said recently.

They are a bit of Oregon coast science stranger than fiction.

The tricky part – and big surprise – is that pyrosomes are not actually just one creature. They are a mass of colonies all glommed together.

“These totally tubular critters are actually known as a colonial tunicate, a mass of thousands of smaller organisms with a rigid notochord (a simplistic backbone),” Boothe said.

Zooids are mutli-celled creatures: thousands of cloned versions of these create the cylindrical shape we see. These are all connected by tissue that allows each to “communicate” with each other and create coordinated behavior.

Pyrosoma atlanticum is their scientific name, and these are ones found most in the northwest. They show up as a rigid, bumpy, pinkish-gray tube about the size of a finger, usually reaching a max of about two feet here. However, there are some types south of the U.S. that get up to 30 feet long.

The name means “fire body,” and that's because these freaky little wonders are bioluminescent. That is only so if they're alive and in the water, however. You won't see them glowing on the beaches at nights.

Scientist don't totally understand why they showed up in such great numbers last decade, but they're starting to think it had something to do with all the phytoplankton in the region. Appearances of Pyrosomes on Oregon Coast Still a Big Puzzle to Scientists

Just prior to the 2016 inundation, some Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) researchers saw thousands of them in the waters off this coast while scuba diving, and they were tipped off a large run was coming.

One former oceanography student from OSU told Oregon Coast Beach Connection back in 2020 how she was part of a research expedition off the U.S. coast and saw hordes of these glowing creatures moving past the viewing screen of the vessel. It was a rather unforgettable visual description. The expedition happened during the height of the pyrosome invasion of Oregon and Washington beaches back in 2017 or so.

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