Talk about getting an eye-full! A man’s relaxing stroll along a beach in the US state of Florida took an unforeseen turn this week when instead of spotting shells or crabs on the sandy coastline he discovered an eyeball the size of a softball staring up at him.
“It was very, very fresh. It was still bleeding when I put it in the plastic bag,” Gino Covacci told the Orlando Sentinel, after discovering the huge blue eyeball this week on Pompano Beach on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Florida peninsula.
Covacci contacted local wildlife officers who could not determine immediately what organism the eyeball had come from. But Carli Segelson, spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said Friday it was probably from a large marine animal “because it was found on the beach.”
Biologists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute are currently studying the softball-sized eyeball and have preserved the orb with formalin, a formaldehyde solution. More information may be released about their findings soon, Segelson said.
A variety of aquatic life inhabits the oceanic waters off the coast of southern Florida, including swordfish, hammerhead sharks, and manatees, but Covacci believes the eyeball he discovered may have come from an octopus or a squid.
Segelson did not see it quite that way. “At this point, the main candidate is a large fish,” she said.
